Sleeper Shells: Attackers Are Planting Dormant Backdoors in Ivanti EPMM

Every single Ivanti product (including their SSL-VPN) should be considered a critical threat. The fact that this company is allowed to continue to sell their malware dressed-up as "security solutions" is a disaster. How they haven't been sued into bankruptcy is something I'll never understand.

Can't help but notice the weird choice of illustration in TFA.

Ivanti is a US company. But if you have never heard of them, the dragon-resembling creature in the illustration (representing the dormant backdoor?) makes it look like the incident is somehow related to China.

>We are aware of a very limited number of customers whose solution has been exploited at the time of disclosure.

“We are aware” and “very limited” are likely (in our opinion, this is probably not fact, etc, etc) to be doing a significant amount of lifting.

For avoidance of doubt, the following versions of Ivanti EPMM are patched:

None

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Ah, this company is a security joke as most software security companies are.

Related: Someone Knows Bash Far Too Well, And We Love It (Ivanti EPMM Pre-Auth RCEs CVE-2026-1281 & CVE-2026-1340) https://labs.watchtowr.com/someone-knows-bash-far-too-well-a...

I didn't see that exploit showing up on Hackernews so here it is

https://hub.ivanti.com/s/article/Security-Advisory-Ivanti-En...

Ivanti doesn't explain how this happened or what mistake led to this exploit being created.

There is some dark amusement about an MDM and general enterprise management and security systems being used as the attack vector. Ivanti in particular has proven itself to be swiss cheese as of late, and would be bankrupt if people cared about security rather than it being a compliance/insurance checkbox that truly _nobody_ cares about in practice.

Semi-related: with the recent much-touted cybersecurity improvements of AI models (as well as the general recent increase in tensions and conflicts worldwide) I wonder just how much the pace of attacks will increase, and whether it’ll prove to be a benefit or a disadvantage over time. Government sponsored teams were already combing through every random weekend project and library that somehow ended in node or became moderately popular, but soon any dick and tom will be able to do it at scale for a few bucks. On the other hand, what’s being exploited tends to get patched in time - but this can take quite a while, especially when the target is some random side project on github last updated 4 years ago.

My gut feeling is that there will be a lot more exploitation everywhere, and not much upside for the end consumer (who didn’t care about state level actors anyway). Probably a good idea to firewall aggressively and minimize the surface area that can be attacked in the first place. The era of running any random vscode extension and trust-me-bro chrome extension is likely at an end. I’m also looking forward to being pwned by wifi enabled will-never-be-updated smart appliances that seem to multiply by the year.

thank god they're dormant eh