American industrial giant Emerson this week informed customers that it has released firmware updates for its Rosemount X-STREAM gas analyzers to address half a dozen vulnerabilities, including ones that have been rated high severity.
Emerson’s gas analyzers are designed to allow industrial organizations to continuously analyze process gas emissions. The company discovered during internal testing that its X-STREAM enhanced analyzers are affected by a total of six vulnerabilities.
The company published an initial advisory in December 2020, but it did not provide any information about the vulnerabilities — it only provided some general recommendations that customers could apply until patches became available.
A second version of the advisory was published on May 18, when the company provided a brief description for each vulnerability and informed customers about the availability of patches.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which also published an advisory for these flaws on May 18, said the impacted products are used worldwide, particularly in the energy and chemical sectors.
Three of the six flaws have been assigned high severity ratings. One of them is related to user credentials being encrypted with a weak algorithm. An attacker who obtains these credentials can access a device and reconfigure it or obtain sensitive information.
Another high-severity vulnerability is related to the application allowing file uploads, which enables an attacker to upload malicious files that can give them access to login credentials and other sensitive information.
A high severity rating has also been assigned to a path traversal issue that can be exploited to access data stored on the web server by directly typing the URL of the targeted page.
The other three vulnerabilities have been rated medium severity, and they can allow an attacker to intercept cookies, inject arbitrary code into a web page via an XSS attack, and obtain passwords and other sensitive data via clickjacking.
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“Emerson does not recommend connecting the Affected Products directly to the Internet. It is important to note that if the Affected Product is isolated from the internet as recommended, and running on a well-protected network consistent with industry best practices, the potential risk is lowered,” Emerson said in its advisory.
It added, “Each user should consider their particular system configuration and circumstances and determine the effect of this potential issue as it relates to their application and take appropriate actions.”
The advisory does not specify what type of access and permissions are needed to exploit these vulnerabilities, but based on the available information it seems that at least some of them can be exploited remotely and without authentication.
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