Building automation products from American Auto-Matrix are affected by a couple of high-severity vulnerabilities that allow remote hackers to compromise the affected system, ICS-CERT warned on Thursday.
One of the flaws, identified as CVE-2016-2307, has been described as a local file inclusion and it allows an attacker to read arbitrary files on the host system, including configuration files.
The second issue, tracked as CVE-2016-2308, refers to the storage of passwords in plain text in a file that can be accessed by an unauthenticated attacker. CVE-2016-2307 has been assigned a CVSS v3 score of 7.5, while CVE-2016-2308 has been assigned a score of 8.6.
“User logins and passwords presented in plain text provide an attacker authenticated credentials to all aspects of the system,” ICS-CERT wrote in its advisory.
Maxim Rupp, the researcher who discovered the vulnerabilities, told SecurityWeek that he reported the issues in August 2015. American Auto-Matrix addressed the security holes in mid-July.
According to Rupp, the vulnerabilities can be exploited remotely from the Internet and affected systems can be found through the Shodan search engine. The researcher said all the devices he found online were vulnerable to attacks.
ICS-CERT said there is no evidence that the vulnerabilities have been exploited in the wild, but the agency has warned that even a low-skilled attacker can exploit them.
The affected products are American Auto-Matrix’s Aspect-Nexus and Aspect-Matrix, which are used in several sectors in the United States. The vulnerabilities exist in the front-end application of these products.
The Aspect-Matrix hardware platform reached end of life last year and the vulnerabilities will not be fixed. In Aspect-Nexus, which provides extensive building control routines, the flaws have been resolved with the release of version 3.0.0 on July 15. ICS-CERT’s advisory contains instructions on how to install the update.
In the past year, ICS-CERT has disclosed several vulnerabilities found by Rupp, including in industrial routers, gateways and servers from Moxa, Accuenergy’s Acuvim power meters, an HMI from ICONICS, and Tollgrade’s LightHouse Sensor Management System.
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