Several products from industrial networking and automation solutions provider Moxa are plagued by a critical vulnerability. The vendor has released firmware updates for many of the affected devices.
Security researcher Maxim Rupp discovered that some Moxa serial device servers and cellular IP gateways are affected by a flaw that can be exploited to brute force their authentication mechanism and gain access to the vulnerable system (CVE-2016-5799).
The expert also determined that the products are exposed to attacks due to a less severe issue related to the storage of plaintext passwords in configuration files (CVE-2016-5812).
According to an advisory published by ICS-CERT on Tuesday, the security holes affect OnCell G3100V2, G3111, G3151, G3211 and G3251 gateways, which allow organizations to connect serial or ethernet devices to a cellular network. The products are used in various sectors, primarily in Europe and Asia.
However, Rupp told SecurityWeek that the authentication bypass flaw, which has a CVSS score of 9.8, also impacts OnCell G3150 gateways, OnCell 5004 industrial routers, NPort 6150 and 6450 secure terminal servers, and NPort 5250A and MiiNePort E2 serial device servers.
The vulnerabilities can be exploited remotely and the researcher said he identified roughly 400 Internet-connected Moxa devices in the past year.
Rupp reported the issues to ICS-CERT in December 2015. Moxa appears to have released firmware updates that address the vulnerabilities in OnCell products in late July and early August.
Last month, Rupp was credited for finding a critical authentication bypass vulnerability (CVE-2016-5804) in Moxa MGate, a serial-to-ethernet modbus gateway used by organizations around the world.
Another critical flaw was found by Zhou Yu of Acorn Network Security in Moxa SoftCMS, a central management software for large-scale surveillance systems. The weakness, disclosed earlier this month by ICS-CERT, is a SQL injection (CVE-2016-5792) that allows a remote attacker to access the vulnerable product.
Related: Learn More at SecurityWeek’s 2016 ICS Cyber Security Conference
Related: Serious Vulnerabilities Found in Moxa Industrial Secure Routers

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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