Quote:Threat actors exploited an unpatched Citrix flaw to breach the network of the U.S. Census Bureau in January in an attack that was ultimately halted before a backdoor could be installed or sensitive data could be stolen, according to a report by a government watchdog organization.
However, investigators found that officials were informed of the flaw in its servers and had at least two opportunities to fix it before the attack, mainly due to lack of coordination between teams responsible for different security tasks, according to the report, published Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Commerce Office of Inspector General. The bureau also lagged in its discovery and reporting of the attack after it happened.
The report details and reviews the incident that occurred on Jan. 11, 2020, when attackers used the publicly available exploit for a critical flaw to target remote-access servers operated by the bureau.
Citrix released a public notice about the zero-day flaw—tracked as CVE-2019-19781–in December. In January, a representative from the bureau’s Computer Incident Response Team (CIRT_ attended two meetings in which the flaw was discussed and attendees even received a link to steps to use fixes which already had been issued by Citrix.
“Despite the publicly available notices released in December and attending two meetings on the issue in January, the bureau CIRT did not coordinate with the team responsible for implementing these mitigation steps until after the servers had been attacked,” according to the report. Doing so could have prevented the attack, investigators noted.
Read more: Postmortem on U.S. Census Hack Exposes Cybersecurity Failures
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