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
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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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