Siemens’ Patch Tuesday updates for April 2019 address several serious vulnerabilities, including some denial-of-service (DoS) flaws affecting many of the company’s industrial products.
Siemens has been publishing Patch Tuesday updates — updates released on the second Tuesday of every month by companies such as Microsoft, Adobe and SAP — since November 2018. This Tuesday, the company posted six new advisories describing a total of 11 vulnerabilities.
The company has informed customers that it has started releasing patches for a high-severity DoS vulnerability affecting some of its SIMATIC, SINEC-NMS, SINEMA, SINUMERIK and TeleControl products. It’s worth noting that DoS vulnerabilities can pose a bigger risk in the case of industrial systems, compared to IT systems, where availability is more important than confidentiality.
The flaw (CVE-2019-6575) can be exploited by a remote, unauthenticated attacker to cause a DoS condition in OPC communications component or crash a device by sending it specially crafted network packets on TCP port 4840.
Another serious DoS flaw (CVE-2019-6568) has been found in the web server component used by many CP, SIMATIC, SINAMICS, SITOP and TIM industrial products. While exploitation of the security hole does not require authentication or user interaction, the attacker does need to have network access in order to trigger the bug.
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A high-severity DoS vulnerability has also been identified in SIMOCODE pro V EIP, a modular management system for low-voltage motors. The flaw can be exploited remotely by sending specially crafted packets to the targeted application on UDP port 161.
This weakness, tracked as CVE-2017-12741, was first disclosed in 2017 after it was discovered by a researcher at industrial cybersecurity firm CyberX. Siemens previously published two other advisories that covered this vulnerability and its impact on various products.
A different advisory published this week by the German industrial giant describes three vulnerabilities patched in its RUGGEDCOM ROX II routers. The flaws, including ones described as having “high” and “critical” severity, are related to the Quagga BGP daemon (bgpd) used in these devices, and they can be exploited for various purposes, including arbitrary code execution. However, exploitation is in most cases not easy as the attacker needs to be in the position of a trusted BGP peer, Siemens said.
Siemens also informed customers of four vulnerabilities affecting the SINEMA Remote Connect client and server. The flaws, all rated “high severity,” can allow code execution and DoS attacks.
The last advisory describes a critical OS command injection vulnerability in the Spectrum Power product, which provides SCADA, communications and data modeling components for control and monitoring systems. Exploitation of the flaw does not require any authentication, but it does require network access to the web server on TCP ports 80 or 443.
Siemens says it’s not aware of any malicious exploits targeting these flaws.
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