Germany-based industrial connectivity solutions provider Weidmueller has released firmware updates for many of its managed industrial Ethernet switches to address critical vulnerabilities.
Weidmueller has six manufacturing plants and a presence in 60 locations around the world. According to the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the impacted products are used worldwide, particularly in the critical manufacturing and IT sectors.
Advisories published recently by CISA, Germany’s CERT@VDE and Weidmuller show that 40 IE-SW series switches are impacted by five types of vulnerabilities.
The most serious flaws, based on their CVSS score, are related to the lack of brute-force protection for the authentication mechanism, the transmission of credentials in clear text, and the use of predictable authentication information in a cookie. All of these issues are considered critical, with a CVSS score of 9.8.
The industrial switches are also affected by a high-severity flaw related to the storage of passwords in clear text. This weakness allows anyone with access to the device to obtain the passwords.
Finally, Weidmueller discovered a medium-severity issue that allows a remote, authenticated attacker to crash the device using specially crafted packets.
Weidmueller has released firmware updates for each of the impacted switches. Users have also been informed that they can configure their devices to only use encrypted connections, which can prevent some types of attacks. Some weaknesses are related to the use of an unencrypted search service, which should be disabled — an encrypted search service is available.
The vendor has provided detailed instructions on how mitigations can be applied.
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