Network security appliance vendor SonicWall late Thursday shipped urgent patches for a critical flaw in its Global Management System (GMS) software, warning that the issue exposes businesses to remote hacker attacks.
The vulnerability, which carries a critical-severity rating of CVSS 9.4, provides a pathway for a remote attacker to execute arbitrary SQL queries in the database, according to SonicWall’s documentation of the issue.
The vulnerability exists due to insufficient sanitization of user-supplied data, setting up scenarios where a remote non-authenticated attacker can send a specially crafted request to the affected application and execute arbitrary SQL commands within the application database.
According to this advisory, successful exploitation of the SonicWall GMS security defect may allow a remote attacker to read, delete, modify data in the database and gain complete control over the affected application.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-22280, affects SonicWall Global Management System installations before 9.3.1-SP2-Hotfix-2.
[ READ: Zero-Day Flaws in SonicWall Email Security Product Exploited ]
SonicWall said it was not aware of active exploitation in the wild or the public release of proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code targeting the bug.
Here’s Sonicwall’s description of the issue:
CVE-2022-22280 is a critical vulnerability (CVSS 9.4) that results in an Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an SQL command in SonicWall GMS.
There is no workaround available for this vulnerability. However, the likelihood of exploitation may be significantly reduced by incorporating a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to block SQLi attempts.
The company’s product security incident response team is pushing organizations using the affected GMS version to apply the patches immediately.
SonicWall has published deployment guides [pdf] to help organizations to upgrade GMS deployments.
SonicWall’s Global Management System is used by enterprise customers to rapidly deploy and centrally manage SonicWall firewall, wireless, email security, and secure remote access tools from a single console.
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Ryan Naraine is Editor-at-Large at SecurityWeek and host of the popular Security Conversations podcast series. He is a security community engagement expert who has built programs at major global brands, including Intel Corp., Bishop Fox and GReAT. Ryan is a founding-director of the Security Tinkerers non-profit, an advisor to early-stage entrepreneurs, and a regular speaker at security conferences around the world.
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