Brute Force Attacks Against Watchguard VPN Endpoints

Published: 2024-06-05
Last Updated: 2024-06-05 14:05:58 UTC
by Johannes Ullrich (Version: 1)
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If you have a pulse and work in information security (or are a new scraping script without a pulse), you have probably seen reports of attacks against VPN endpoints. Running any VPN without strong authentication has been negligent for years, but in recent times, ransomware gangs, in particular, picked them off pretty quickly.

One of our honeypots just saw an attacker move through, attempting to brute force a Watchguard firewall VPN. I haven't seen much written about Watchguard lately, so I figured this may be a good reminder. The requests I was seeing against one honeypot in particular:

 

POST /wgcgi.cgi HTTP/1.1\
Host: [honeypot IP address redacted]:4443
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 109

fw_username=robert&fw_password=123456a%21&submit=Login&action=sslvpn_web_logon&fw_logon_type=logon&lang=en-US

Note the bare-bones headers without a user agent, suggesting a simple script to be used for these attacks.

The main source of these attacks so far has been 185.122.204.102. In February, this IP address hit a couple of other URLs, such as login.

Interestingly, so far, I have seen only two usernames being used: "jason" and "robert". Not sure why this is significant.

The list of passwords is a bit longer:
 

1
123%40secure
123456
1234567
123456a%21
1qazxsw23edc%21
%24ecure%40123
32Yp6jan
456%40%23pass%40
admin
Admin1234
admin2
Admin%4012345
ASDqwe%40123
itsupport
letmein
P%40ss0wrd
P%40ss1234
P%40ssw0rd
P%40ssw0rd12345
P%40ssw0rduser1
P%40zzw0rd%21123
Pa%24%24word%231
Pa55word
pass2828
password
Password01%21
password4321
qweasdzxc
sslvpn
sslvpnuser
Test123%21
vpn%40dmin
VPNgrp
Welcome123%21
Welcome2020%21
Welcome2%2B

You may want to block the use of any of these passwords and add them to your brute force list.

---
Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D. , Dean of Research, SANS.edu
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