Technology

F5 said a “sophisticated” threat group working for an undisclosed nation-state government had surreptitiously and persistently dwelled in its network over a “long-term.” Security researchers who have responded to similar intrusions in the past took the language to mean the hackers were inside the F5 network for years.

This could be really bad. F5 produces WAN accelerators, and one feature that those can have is to have X.509 self-signed certificates used by corporate internal CAs stored on them

things that normally, you'd keep pretty damned secure

to basically "legitimately" perform MITM attacks on traffic internal to corporate networks as part of their normal mode of operation.

Like, if an attacker could compromise F5 Networks and get a malicious software update pushed out to WAN accelerators in the field to exfiltrate critical private keys from companies, that could be bad. You could probably potentially MITM their corporate VPNs. If you get inside a customer's network, it'd probably let you get by a lot of their internal security.

kagis

Yeah, it sounds like that is exactly what they hit. The "BIG-IP" stuff apparently does this:

During that time, F5 said, the hackers took control of the network segment the company uses to create and distribute updates for BIG IP, a line of server appliances that F5 says is used by 48 of the world’s top 50 corporations

https://techdocs.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/manuals/product/ltm-implementations-11-5-1/10.html

MyF5 Home > Knowledge Centers > BIG-IP LTM > BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager: Implementations > Managing Client and Server HTTPS Traffic using a Self-signed Certificate

One of the ways to configure the BIG-IP system to manage SSL traffic is to enable both client-side and server-side SSL termination:

• Client-side SSL termination makes it possible for the system to decrypt client requests before sending them on to a server, and encrypt server responses before sending them back to the client. This ensures that client-side HTTPS traffic is encrypted. In this case, you need to install only one SSL key/certificate pair on the BIG-IP system.
• Server-side SSL termination makes it possible for the system to decrypt and then re-encrypt client requests before sending them on to a server. Server-side SSL termination also decrypts server responses and then re-encrypts them before sending them back to the client. This ensures security for both client- and server-side HTTPS traffic. In this case, you need to install two SSL key/certificate pairs on the BIG-IP system. The system uses the first certificate/key pair to authenticate the client, and uses the second pair to request authentication from the server.

This implementation uses a self-signed certificate to authenticate HTTPS traffic.

Well. That...definitely sucks.