Siemens has released software updates for several of its industrial automation products to address medium and high severity vulnerabilities discovered by researchers from various companies.
ICS-CERT and Siemens each published three separate advisories to describe the flaws found in SIMATIC and SINEMA products.
Antonio Morales Maldonado of InnoTec System, and Alexander Van Maele and Tijl Deneut of Howest have been credited for finding a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the integrated web server of SINEMA Remote Connect Server, a remote network management platform.
The flaw, tracked as CVE-2016-6204, can be exploited by a remote attacker by tricking the targeted user into clicking on a specially crafted link. The issue affects SINEMA Remote Connect Server versions prior to 1.2, which resolves the security hole.
Siemens has also informed customers about three vulnerabilities found in some of its SIMATIC products. SIMATIC WinCC SCADA systems and PCS7 distributed control systems (DCS) are affected by two high severity improper input validation bugs.
One of them, assigned the identifier CVE-2016-5743 and a CVSS score of 9.8, allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code by sending specially crafted packets to the WinCC or WinCC Runtime Professional products. The second vulnerability, CVE-2016-5744, can be leveraged to extract arbitrary files from the WinCC station.
Researchers also discovered that the Siemens SIMATIC NET PC-Software, which handles communications between PLCs and HMIs, can be caused to enter a denial-of-service (DoS) condition by sending it specially crafted packets. The system can only be recovered through a manual restart after such an attack.
The SIMATIC flaws were reported directly to Siemens by Vladimir Dashchenko and Sergey Temnikov of Kaspersky Labs.
Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk EnergyMetrix Vulnerabilities
ICS-CERT has also published an advisory detailing a couple of high severity flaws affecting Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk EnergyMetrix, a web-based management software that provides organizations critical energy data.
The product is plagued by a SQL injection vulnerability (CVE-2016-4522) that could be exploited to access the application’s data files, and a weakness related to the failure to invalidate user sessions immediately after logout (CVE-2016-4531). By failing to ensure that the session expires properly, the product allows attackers to access the system with a legitimate user’s credentials.
The security holes have been addressed with the release of Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk EnergyMetrix versions 2.20.00 and 2.30.00.
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