Alert - Vulnerabilities impacting ConnectWise ScreenConnect

Audience

This Alert is intended for IT professionals and managers.

Purpose

An Alert is used to raise awareness of a recently identified cyber threat that may impact cyber information assets, and to provide additional detection and mitigation advice to recipients. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security ("Cyber Centre") is also available to provide additional assistance regarding the content of this Alert to recipients as requested.

Details

On February 19, 2024, the Cyber Centre became aware of vulnerabilities impacting all versions of ConnectWise ScreenConnect prior to 23.9.8. In response, the Cyber Centre released advisory AV24-100 along with an update on February 20, 2024, highlighting that the vulnerabilities are being exploited^{Footnote 1}.

ConnectWise reports that CVE-2024-1709 is an authentication bypass vulnerability and CVE-2024-1708 is a path traversal flaw. These vulnerabilities combined could allow for remote code execution (RCE)^{Footnote 2}.

While ConnectWise has indicated that CVE-2024-1709 may be exploited in the wild, open-source researchers have reported that exploitation impacting both CVE-2024-1708 and CVE-2024-1709 have been observed and in some cases resulted in the deployment of ransomware.

Suggested actions

The Cyber Centre strongly recommends that organizations patch any ScreenConnect systems immediately. ConnectWise recommends updating impacted products to version 23.9.8^{Footnote 2}. The vendor states cloud partners are remediated against both vulnerabilities reported on February 19.

Organizations should also review and implement the Cyber Centre’s Top 10 IT Security Actions^{Footnote 3} with an emphasis on the following topics:

• Consolidating, monitoring, and defending Internet gateways.
• Patching operating systems and applications.
• Isolate web-facing applications.

Should activity matching the content of this alert be discovered, recipients are encouraged to report via the My Cyber Portal, or email contact@cyber.gc.ca.

Partner Reporting

NCSC-NZ - Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution in ConnectWise's ScreenConnect