Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

ICS/OT

Vulnerability in Linear eMerge Access Controllers Exploited in the Wild

Hackers are actively targeting a vulnerability in Linear eMerge E3 access controllers to infect the devices with malware and abuse them to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, SonicWall revealed over the weekend.

Hackers are actively targeting a vulnerability in Linear eMerge E3 access controllers to infect the devices with malware and abuse them to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, SonicWall revealed over the weekend.

A Nortek Security and Control LLC product, the Linear eMerge E3 access controller is used in the commercial, industrial, banking, medical, retail, and hospitality sectors to manage user access to specific facilities or areas.

In April last year, Gjoko Krstic, a researcher at industrial cybersecurity firm Applied Risk, presented at SecurityWeek’s ICS Cyber Security Conference in Singapore information on vulnerabilities found in building management and access control systems from various vendors, including Nortek.

Out of more than 100 vulnerabilities Krstic found in the analyzed systems during a year-long investigation, 10 were impacting Nortek’s Linear eMerge E3 product, and six of them were considered critical.

Learn More at SecurityWeek’s 2020 ICS Cyber Security Conference

Now, nearly one year later, SonicWall says it is seeing tens of thousands of daily attempts to exploit one of the critical vulnerabilities Applied Risk discovered in the eMerge E3 access controllers.

Tracked as CVE-2019-7256, the flaw is a command injection vulnerability that results from the insufficient sanitization of user-supplied input to a PHP function. The issue can be exploited to achieve arbitrary command execution with root privileges.

“The application constructs an OS command using externally-influenced input from an upstream component, but incorrectly neutralizes special elements that could modify the intended OS command when it is sent to a downstream component,” reads an advisory from Applied Risk.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

As SonicWall explains, an adversary could exploit the vulnerability remotely without authentication, via a crafted HTTP request, and this is exactly the type of attack that is being observed in the wild right now.

Following the successful exploitation of the vulnerability, a shell command is executed to download malware and install it on the vulnerable system. The malware can then be leveraged to launch various types of DDoS attacks.

The issue affects Linear eMerge Elite/Essential firmware version 1.00-06, and over 2,300 potentially affected devices are exposed to the internet.

“Attackers seem to be actively targeting these devices as we see tens of thousands of hits every day, targeting over 100 countries with the most observed in U.S.,” SonicWall says.

Last year, Krstic told SecurityWeek that Nortek was the only manufacturer that refused communication with Applied Risk, while others resolved the reported issues. Nortek claimed at the time that the vulnerabilities had been addressed, but Applied Risk said it never actually got the chance to share vulnerability details with the vendor.

Related: Over 100 Flaws Expose Buildings to Hacker Attacks

Related: Critical Vulnerabilities Found in Prima FlexAir Access Control System

Related: Hackers Can Abuse Legitimate Features to Hijack Industrial Controllers

Written By

Ionut Arghire is an international correspondent for SecurityWeek.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join the session as we discuss the challenges and best practices for cybersecurity leaders managing cloud identities.

Register

SecurityWeek’s Ransomware Resilience and Recovery Summit helps businesses to plan, prepare, and recover from a ransomware incident.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Vulnerabilities

Less than a week after announcing that it would suspended service indefinitely due to a conflict with an (at the time) unnamed security researcher...

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Data Breaches

OpenAI has confirmed a ChatGPT data breach on the same day a security firm reported seeing the use of a component affected by an...

IoT Security

A group of seven security researchers have discovered numerous vulnerabilities in vehicles from 16 car makers, including bugs that allowed them to control car...

Vulnerabilities

A researcher at IOActive discovered that home security systems from SimpliSafe are plagued by a vulnerability that allows tech savvy burglars to remotely disable...

Risk Management

The supply chain threat is directly linked to attack surface management, but the supply chain must be known and understood before it can be...

Cybercrime

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft calls attention to a series of zero-day remote code execution attacks hitting its Office productivity suite.