Cyber Risks · Unit 42 Palo Alto Networks

Examining the CHS Breach and Heartbleed Exploitation

Summary: TrustedSec reported that the Community Health Systems breach, which CHS's 8-K filing said stole records of approximately 4.5 million patients in attacks between April and June 2014, resulted from exploitation of the Heartbleed OpenSSL vulnerability (CVE-2014-0160). Attackers reportedly scraped VPN credentials from a vulnerable device via Heartbleed and used them to log in and move laterally through the network, which may make this the first public breach tied to Heartbleed since its April disclosure.

Bottom line: Heartbleed lets an attacker scrape memory from a vulnerable device, and in this case that memory held VPN credentials for a network holding 4.5 million patient records - a reminder that unpatched OpenSSL systems may persist for years and that a single probe in your logs can be the front door being tested.

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Topics
Vulnerabilities & Patching
Mentions
CVE-2014-0160
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