Fire Ant is a threat actor engaged in a prolonged cyber espionage campaign focusing on VMware ESXi and vCenter environments and network appliances. This campaign includes sophisticated, multilayered attack techniques that allow access to isolated network environments. The threat actor exhibits persistence and operational adaptability, maintaining access despite eradication efforts. Fire Ant shares tooling similarities with the UNC3886 group, known for targeting virtualization technologies. Key attack strategies include exploiting the CVE-2023-34048 vulnerability and establishing control over ESXi hosts and vCenter servers while circumventing network defenses.
The threat actor leveraged combinations of sophisticated and stealthy techniques creating multilayered attack kill chains to facilitate access to restricted and segmented network assets within presumed to be isolated environments.
Fire Ant's breach of the virtualization management layer is achieved by the exploitation of CVE-2023-34048, a known security flaw in VMware vCenter Server that has been exploited by UNC3886 as a zero-day for years prior to it being patched by Broadcom in October 2023.
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