Managed security risk assessment provider Digital Defense has identified several vulnerabilities in the Dell SonicWALL Global Management System (GMS), a platform that allows organizations to centrally manage their SonicWALL solutions. The vendor has released a hotfix to patch the issues.
According to Digital Defense, the platform is plagued by a total of six flaws, five of which have been classified as critical or high severity. An attacker can exploit the vulnerabilities to gain complete control over the GMS interface and all attached SonicWALL appliances.
Two of the critical security holes have been described as unauthenticated command injections that allow an attacker to obtain a reverse root shell on the virtual appliance. The attacker can then use the shell to access database credentials and change the password of the administrator in the database.
Another way for an attacker to access the GMS interface and gain control of attached SonicWALL appliances is to use a hidden default account with an easily guessable password. The said account can create non-admin users who can then change the password of the administrator.
Digital Defense warned that an unauthenticated attacker can also obtain the credentials to the database and change the password for the GMS web interface admin account by exploiting an XML external entity (XXE) injection vulnerability. The flaw can be leveraged to compromise the appliance, retrieve arbitrary files, and cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition.
A different XXE injection bug found by researchers can be exploited using specially crafted action message format (AMF) messages. The vulnerability, rated “high severity,” can be used to obtain the MD5 hash for the admin password.
The last issue can be used to cause a DoS condition by sending a specially crafted request to a vulnerable system. This medium severity bug can be exploited without authentication.
In its own advisory, Dell said it released hotfix 174525 for both the GMS and Analyzer products to address vulnerabilities found by Digital Defense. The vendor noted that the flaws affect both the 8.0 and 8.1 versions.
“Users who are unable to apply patches to the affected systems can attempt to mitigate some of the risk posed by these exploit vectors by limiting access to the network services of their SonicWALL GMS appliances to restricted-access internal network segments or dedicated VLANs,” Digital Defense advised users.
Related: Security Product Flaws Allow Attackers to Compromise Systems
Related: Flaw Allowed Attackers to Bypass FireEye Detection Engine
Related: Cisco, Juniper Patch Operating System Flaws
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a managing 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.
More from Eduard Kovacs
- Verisoul Raises $3.25 Million in Seed Funding to Detect Fake Users
- Government Shutdown Could Bench 80% of CISA Staff
- Google Rushes to Patch New Zero-Day Exploited by Spyware Vendor
- macOS 14 Sonoma Patches 60 Vulnerabilities
- New GPU Side-Channel Attack Allows Malicious Websites to Steal Data
- Microsoft Adding New Security Features to Windows 11
- Sony Investigating After Hackers Offer to Sell Stolen Data
- 900 US Schools Impacted by MOVEit Hack at National Student Clearinghouse
Latest News
- Progress Software Patches Critical Pre-Auth Flaws in WS_FTP Server Product
- Verisoul Raises $3.25 Million in Seed Funding to Detect Fake Users
- Lumu Raises $30 Million for Threat Detection and Response Platform
- Government Shutdown Could Bench 80% of CISA Staff
- Moving From Qualitative to Quantitative Cyber Risk Modeling
- Cisco Warns of IOS Software Zero-Day Exploitation Attempts
- Russian Zero-Day Acquisition Firm Offers $20 Million for Android, iOS Exploits
- Sysdig Launches Realtime Attack Graph for Cloud Environments
