A vulnerability affecting industrial automation software from Delta Electronics appears to have been exploited in attacks, and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is urging organizations to take action as soon as possible.
CISA on Thursday added 10 security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog and instructed federal agencies to address them by September 15.
One of the flaws is CVE-2021-38406, a high-severity remote code execution vulnerability affecting the Delta Electronics DOPSoft 2 software, which is used for designing and programming human-machine interfaces (HMIs). The vulnerability is an out-of-bounds write issue and it can be exploited by getting the targeted user to open a specially crafted project file.
CISA published an advisory describing this and other DOPSoft 2 vulnerabilities in September 2021. At the time, the agency informed users that the flaws would not be patched as the product had reached end of life and the vendor had been advising customers to switch to supported software. CISA now says the product should be removed if still in use.
There do not appear to be any public reports describing exploitation of this vulnerability, except for a blog post published by Palo Alto Networks on August 19, which lists several flaws that have been exploited in the wild, based on data collected by the company between February and April 2022.
CVE-2021-38406 is listed in the blog post, but no information is provided about the attacks exploiting it. SecurityWeek has reached out to Palo Alto Networks for additional information on the exploitation of CVE-2021-38406.
As noted in a recent SecurityWeek analysis, it’s not uncommon for threat actors to conduct indiscriminate internet scanning activity that also targets vulnerabilities in operational technology (OT) products, but this does not mean the targeted flaws have actually been exploited in attacks — only that they could be. It’s rare for vulnerabilities in industrial control systems (ICS) to actually be exploited in attacks.
However, CISA clarified recently that only vulnerabilities for which it has reliable evidence of exploitation are added to its ‘must patch’ list.
Palo Alto Networks has also reported seeing exploitation of a remote code execution vulnerability in Apache APISIX (CVE-2022-24112) and a Grafana Snapshot authentication bypass vulnerability (CVE-2021-39226) in the data collected between February and April 2022.
There do not appear to be any other reports describing exploitation of these vulnerabilities so it’s likely that CISA added them based on the cybersecurity firm’s report.
CISA has also added to its catalog CVE-2022-26352, an unrestricted file upload vulnerability affecting dotCMS. The issue, which allows remote code execution, was discovered by researchers while taking part in a bank’s bug bounty program. A Metasploit module targeting the flaw was added recently.
CISA has also added two vulnerabilities affecting the PEAR Archive_Tar library designed for handling .tar files in PHP. Exploitation of CVE-2020-28949 allows an attacker to execute arbitrary PHP code or overwrite files, while CVE-2020-36193 allows path traversal. SecurityWeek wrote about these security holes in November 2020 and January 2021 when they were patched by Drupal developers — Drupal uses the impacted library.
While we have not seen any reports of exploitation in attacks, Drupal released an out-of-band patch for CVE-2020-28949 due to the availability of exploits.
For some of the vulnerabilities added to CISA’s catalog, reports of active exploitation were published weeks or months ago, including for the Apache CouchDB vulnerability CVE-2022-24706, the Spring vulnerability CVE-2022-22963, the Chrome (WebRTC) vulnerability CVE-2022-2294, and the iOS and macOS vulnerability CVE-2021-31010.
The macOS and iOS vulnerability was patched by Apple in September 2021 alongside the Forcedentry zero-days, but the tech giant silently updated its advisories in May 2022 to add this vulnerability and confirm that it had been exploited in attacks.
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