Siemens Patches Vulnerabilities in Ruggedcom, SCALANCE Products

Siemens has resolved several vulnerabilities affecting the company’s SCALANCE industrial switches and Ruggedcom WIN base stations.

According to an advisory published by ICS-CERT, the SCALANCE X-200IRT (Isochronous Realtime Ethernet) switch family is affected by a remotely exploitable user impersonation vulnerability (CVE- 2015-1049).

The switches are used to connect programmable logic controllers (PLCs), human-machine interfaces (HMIs) and other industrial components. The devices are deployed in various sectors worldwide.

“The device’s web server could allow unauthenticated attackers to impersonate legitimate users of the web interface (Port 80/TCP and Port 443/TCP) if an active web session of an authenticated user exists at the time of attack,” ICS-CERT said in its advisory.

The vulnerability affects SCALANCE X-200IRT switches running versions of the firmware prior to V5.2.0. The company addressed the issue with the release of version 5.2.0.

There are no known public exploits for the vulnerability and Siemens has pointed out that an attacker needs network access to the device and a legitimate user must be logged in to the targeted switch’s Web interface for the attack to work.

Siemens has also released a firmware update to fix a total of three vulnerabilities affecting Ruggedcom WIN, high-power, broadband wireless base stations used in various sectors across the world. The issues were discovered and reported to the company by IOActive researchers.

One of the security holes found in Ruggedcom WIN solutions is an improper authentication issue (CVE- 2015-1448) that can be leveraged by an unauthenticated attacker to perform administrative operations on the network. A critical buffer overflow vulnerability (CVE- 2015-1449) that could be exploited for remote code execution affects the device’s integrated Web server, ICS-CERT said.

Another flaw impacting Ruggedcom WIN devices can be leveraged by a malicious actor to obtain passwords from security logs or local files (CVE- 2015-1357).

The flaws have not been exploited in the wild and they can only be leveraged by an attacker with network access to the devices, and access to security log files (in the case of CVE- 2015-1357), Siemens noted in its advisory.

The vulnerabilities affect Ruggedcom WIN51xx and Win52xx versions prior to SS4.4.4624.35, and WIN70xx and WIN72xx versions prior to BS4.4.4621.32.

Siemens advises industrial control system (ICS) operators to install the latest firmware versions and protect network access to these products by using appropriate mechanisms.

In January, the Germany-based electronics and industrial conglomerate released firmware updates to address security holes in SCALANCE industrial switches and SIMATIC controllers.