CISA Adds Acclaim USAHERDS Vulnerability to KEV Catalog Amid Active Exploitation

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added a now-patched high-severity security flaw impacting Acclaim Systems USAHERDS to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation in the wild.

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2021-44207 (CVSS score: 8.1), a case of hard-coded, static credentials in Acclaim USAHERDS that could allow an attacker to ultimately execute arbitrary code on susceptible servers.

Specifically, it concerns the use of static ValidationKey and DecryptionKey values in version 7.4.0.1 and prior that could be weaponized to achieve remote code execution on the server that runs the application. That said, an attacker would have to leverage some other means to obtain the keys in the first place.

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“These keys are used to provide security for the application ViewState,” Google-owned Mandiant said in advisory for the flaw back in December 2021. “A threat actor with knowledge of these keys can trick the application server into deserializing maliciously crafted ViewState data.”

“A threat actor with knowledge of the validationKey and decryptionKey for a web application can construct a malicious ViewState that passes the MAC check and will be deserialized by the server. This deserialization can result in the execution of code on the server.”

While there are no new reports of CVE-2021-44207 being weaponized in real-world attacks, the vulnerability was identified as being abused by the China-linked APT41 threat actor back in 2021 as a zero-day as part of attacks targeting six U.S. state government networks.

Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies are recommended to apply vendor-provided mitigations by January 13, 2025, to safeguard their networks against active threats.

The development comes as Adobe warned of a critical security flaw in ColdFusion (CVE-2024-53961, CVSS score: 7.8), which it said already has a known proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit that could cause an arbitrary file system read.

The vulnerability has been addressed in ColdFusion 2021 Update 18 and ColdFusion 2023 Update 12. Users are advised to apply the patches as soon as possible to mitigate potential risks.

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