Siemens and ICS-CERT published advisories this week to alert users of improper authentication and privilege escalation vulnerabilities affecting some SIMATIC and XHQ products.
The SIMATIC communication processor (CP) of the Redundant Network Access (RNA) series, which is designed for connecting S7-400 CPUs to industrial ethernet, is affected by a critical vulnerability that allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to perform administrative actions on a device.
The security hole, tracked as CVE-2017-6868, affects the SIMATIC CP 44x-1 RNA modules running versions prior to 1.4.1. The flaw can only be exploited if the attacker has network access to TCP port 102 and the processor’s configuration is stored on the corresponding CPU.
In a separate advisory, ICS-CERT and Siemens described a medium severity privilege escalation flaw (CVE-2017-6866) affecting the XHQ automation software, which helps organizations improve enterprise performance by providing and aggregating operational and business data.
The vulnerability affects XHQ 4 versions prior to 4.7.1.3 and XHQ 5 versions prior to 5.0.0.2, and it can be exploited by an authenticated attacker with low privileges to read data they should not be allowed to access.
In the past weeks, Siemens released security updates for several of its products, including SINUMERIK automation products, RUGGEDCOM appliances, and SIMATIC and SCALANCE industrial products.
The company also alerted customers last month that many of its medical devices had been exposed to attacks due to the use of the SMB1 protocol, which the WannaCry ransomware exploited in recent attacks. Siemens updated many of its advisories this month to inform users about the availability of patches.
Related: Learn More at SecurityWeek’s 2017 ICS Cyber Security Conference
Related: ‘Industroyer’ ICS Malware Linked to Ukraine Power Grid Attack
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
- Critical TorchServe Flaws Could Expose AI Infrastructure of Major Companies
- Cybersecurity M&A Roundup: 28 Deals Announced in September 2023
- Companies Address Impact of Exploited Libwebp Vulnerability
- Number of Internet-Exposed ICS Drops Below 100,000: Report
- Unpatched Exim Vulnerabilities Expose Many Mail Servers to Attacks
- Recently Patched TeamCity Vulnerability Exploited to Hack Servers
- CISA Warns of Old JBoss RichFaces Vulnerability Being Exploited in Attacks
- NIST Publishes Final Version of 800-82r3 OT Security Guide
Latest News
- Synqly Joins Race to Fix Security, Infrastructure Product Integrations
- ZDI Discusses First Automotive Pwn2Own
- Critical TorchServe Flaws Could Expose AI Infrastructure of Major Companies
- US Executives Targeted in Phishing Attacks Exploiting Flaw in Indeed Job Platform
- Actor Tom Hanks Warns of Ad With AI Imposter
- Network, Meet Cloud; Cloud, Meet Network
- Dozens of Malicious NPM Packages Steal User, System Data
- Motel One Discloses Ransomware Attack Impacting Customer Data
