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A critical vulnerability patched 10 days ago in widely used email software from IT security company Barracuda Networks has been under active exploitation since October. The vulnerability has been used to install multiple pieces of malware inside large organization networks and steal data, Barracuda said Tuesday.

The software bug, tracked as CVE-2023-2868, is a remote command injection vulnerability that stems from incomplete input validation of user-supplied .tar files, which are used to pack or archive multiple files. When file names are formatted in a particular way, an attacker can execute system commands through the QX operator, a function in the Perl programming language that handles quotation marks. The vulnerability is present in the Barracuda Email Security Gateway versions 5.1.3.001 through 9.2.0.006; Barracuda issued a patch 10 days ago.

On Tuesday, Barracuda notified customers that CVE-2023-2868 has been under active exploitation since October in attacks that allowed threat actors to install multiple pieces of malware for use in exfiltrating sensitive data out of infected networks.

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Threat actors connected to the North Korean government have been targeting security researchers in a hacking campaign that uses new techniques and malware in hopes of gaining a foothold inside the companies the targets work for, researchers said.

Researchers from security firm Mandiant said on Thursday that they first spotted the campaign last June while tracking a phishing campaign targeting a US-based customer in the technology industry. The hackers in this campaign attempted to infect targets with three new malware families, dubbed by Mandiant as Touchmove, Sideshow, and Touchshift. The hackers in these attacks also demonstrated new capabilities to counter endpoint detection tools while operating inside targets’ cloud environments.

“Mandiant suspects UNC2970 specifically targeted security researchers in this operation,” Mandiant researchers wrote.