Taiwan-based industrial automation company Advantech has released an update for its WebAccess product to address nearly a dozen vulnerabilities, including critical flaws that allow arbitrary code execution.
Advantech WebAccess is a browser-based software package for human-machine interfaces (HMI) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. The product is used in the United States, Europe and East Asia in the energy, critical manufacturing, and water and wastewater sectors.
The list of security holes rated critical includes unrestricted file upload, path traversal, stack-based buffer overflow, and untrusted pointer dereference issues, all of which can be exploited for arbitrary code execution.
Advantech has also fixed high severity vulnerabilities that can be exploited to obtain sensitive information, modify files, and delete files. There are also a couple of medium severity issues that can be leveraged to steal session cookies and obtain potentially sensitive data through SQL injection.
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According to ICS-CERT, the flaws affect WebAccess versions V8.2_20170817 and prior, WebAccess V8.3.0 and prior, WebAccess Dashboard V.2.0.15 and prior, WebAccess Scada Node versions prior to 8.3.1, and WebAccess/NMS 2.0.3 and prior. The vendor patched them with the release of version 8.3.1 last week.
ICS-CERT has credited researchers Mat Powell, Andrea Micalizzi (rgod), Steven Seeley, Donato Onofri and Simone Onofri for discovering the security bugs. Many of the weaknesses were reported through Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), which will publish advisories in the coming weeks.
Seeley has identified tens of vulnerabilities in WebAccess this year, and some of them, affecting WebAccess HMI Designer, were disclosed in April before Advantech released patches.
ICS-CERT has published a total of four advisories for Advantech WebAccess vulnerabilities this year, including two in January.
A report published last year by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) showed that it had taken Advantech, on average, 131 days to patch vulnerabilities, which was significantly better compared to many other major ICS vendors. ZDI published more than 50 advisories for Advantech vulnerabilities in 2017, which was roughly half the number published in the previous year.
Related: Advantech Patches Flaws in WebAccess SCADA Software
Related: Advantech WebAccess Flaws Allow Access to Sensitive Data
Related: Authentication Flaw Found in Advantech ICS Gateways
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.
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