Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

ICS/OT

Code Execution Flaws Found in WECON Industrial Products

A significant number of vulnerabilities have been found recently in products from China-based WECON, but the vendor has been slow to release patches.

A significant number of vulnerabilities have been found recently in products from China-based WECON, but the vendor has been slow to release patches.

WECON specializes in human-machine interfaces (HMIs), programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and industrial PCs. The company’s products are used all around the world, particularly in the critical manufacturing, energy, and water and wastewater sectors.

An advisory published recently by ICS-CERT reveals that researchers Mat Powell and Natnael Samson discovered several vulnerabilities in WECON’s PI Studio HMI software. The list includes a critical stack-based buffer overflow that allows remote code execution, a high severity out-of-bounds write bug that also allows code execution, and two medium severity information disclosure flaws.

According to ICS-CERT, WECON has confirmed the vulnerabilities, but it has yet to release any patches.

ICS-CERT has this year published four advisories describing vulnerabilities in WECON products, including a medium severity flaw in the company’s PLC Editor ladder logic software, and several high and medium severity bugs in LeviStudio applications.

Learn More About ICS Vulnerabilities at SecurityWeek’s 2018 ICS Cyber Security Conference

All the vulnerabilities for which ICS-CERT has published advisories were reported by Samson, Powell and other researchers through Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI).

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

In fact, ZDI has already published 116 advisories in 2018 and over a dozen will be published in the upcoming period. However, it’s worth noting that ZDI typically publishes multiple advisories for a single CVE as each advisory covers a variation of the same vulnerability.

On the other hand, many of the ICS-CERT advisories and a vast majority of the advisories from ZDI were published before patches were made available by the vendor.

A majority of the security holes allow remote code execution, but since they are related to how the affected applications handle certain file types, the attacker would need to convince the targeted user to open a specially crafted file in order to trigger the exploit.

Related: Hackers Can Chain Multiple Flaws to Attack WAGO HMI Devices

Related: CredSSP Flaw Exposes Pepperl+Fuchs HMI Devices to Attacks

Related: Flaw in Schneider PLC Allows Significant Disruption to ICS

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

Click to comment

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

SecurityWeek’s Threat Detection and Incident Response Summit brings together security practitioners from around the world to share war stories on breaches, APT attacks and threat intelligence.

Register

Securityweek’s CISO Forum will address issues and challenges that are top of mind for today’s security leaders and what the future looks like as chief defenders of the enterprise.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Vulnerabilities

Less than a week after announcing that it would suspended service indefinitely due to a conflict with an (at the time) unnamed security researcher...

Data Breaches

OpenAI has confirmed a ChatGPT data breach on the same day a security firm reported seeing the use of a component affected by an...

Risk Management

The supply chain threat is directly linked to attack surface management, but the supply chain must be known and understood before it can be...

Vulnerabilities

The latest Chrome update brings patches for eight vulnerabilities, including seven reported by external researchers.

Vulnerabilities

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft warns vulnerability (CVE-2023-23397) could lead to exploitation before an email is viewed in the Preview Pane.

Vulnerabilities

Apple has released updates for macOS, iOS and Safari and they all include a WebKit patch for a zero-day vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-23529.

IoT Security

A group of seven security researchers have discovered numerous vulnerabilities in vehicles from 16 car makers, including bugs that allowed them to control car...

IoT Security

A vulnerability affecting Dahua cameras and video recorders can be exploited by threat actors to modify a device’s system time.