Taiwan-based industrial automation company Advantech has released an update for its WebAccess product to address several vulnerabilities, including ones rated high severity.
Advantech WebAccess is a browser-based software package for human-machine interfaces (HMI) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. According to ICS-CERT, the product is used in the United States, Europe and East Asia in sectors such as critical manufacturing, energy, and water and wastewater.
Researchers have once again found several vulnerabilities in this HMI/SCADA product. One of the most serious, based on its CVSS score of 8.2, is CVE-2017-16724, which has been described as a stack-based buffer overflow. These types of security holes typically allow an attacker to crash the application and possibly even execute arbitrary code.
The identifier CVE-2017-16728 has been assigned to several untrusted pointer dereference vulnerabilities that can be exploited to cause the application to crash.
Experts also identified a path traversal flaw that can be exploited to access files on the targeted device (CVE-2017-16720), and a SQL injection vulnerability caused by the lack of proper sanitization of user input (CVE-2017-16716).
The least serious weakness, classified as medium severity, allows an attacker to crash the application using specially crafted inputs.
The vulnerabilities have been patched by Advantech with the release of WebAccess 8.3. The vendor says all prior versions are affected.
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.
Several of the flaws were reported through ZDI by researchers Steven Seeley, Zhou Yu and Andrea Micalizzi. ZDI has prepared advisories for the vulnerabilities, but it has yet to make them public. The list of experts credited by ICS-CERT for finding the flaws also includes Michael Deplante.
Seeley was also credited for finding two remote code execution vulnerabilities in Advantech WebAccess in November.
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 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.
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