Siemens Patches Vulnerabilities in SCALANCE, Other Devices

Siemens this week published five new security advisories describing several vulnerabilities discovered in its switches, routers, building automation products, and medical devices.

One of the advisories covers a high severity flaw that allows an unprivileged attacker to execute arbitrary code with elevated privileges by sending a specially crafted DHCP response to an affected device’s DHCP request. The attacker requires access to the local network segment that hosts the targeted device.

The security hole affects SCALANCE X switches, SCALANCE X-204RNA access points, RUGGEDCOM WiMAX private wireless WAN devices, and RFID 181-EIP and SIMATIC RF182C RFID communication modules.SCALANCE X switch vulnerability

Updates that patch the vulnerability are available for some SCALANCE X switches, while for the other products the vendor has advised customers to apply a series of mitigations that should prevent attacks.

Some SCALANCE X switches are also impacted by two cross-site scripting (XSS) flaws, including one that is persistent. Updates and mitigations are available for both security holes.

Register for SecurityWeek’s 2018 ICS Cyber Security Conference

Siemens also told customers that SCALANCE M875 industrial routers are impacted by six vulnerabilities. Three of them have been classified as high severity, including two command execution flaws that can be exploited by an authenticated attacker with admin privileges, and a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) bug.

The other flaws, rated “medium” severity, have been described as an arbitrary file download issue, an XSS vulnerability, and insecure storage of administrator passwords. Exploitation of all vulnerabilities requires access to the targeted device’s web interface and in some cases involves convincing the user to click on a link or visit a certain page.

The vulnerabilities have been addressed with the release of SCALANCE M876-4 routers, but users can also protect their devices against attacks by applying mitigations recommended by Siemens.

A separate advisory published this week by the automation giant describes two high severity flaws affecting Healthineers RAPID-Lab 1200 series and RAPIDPoint 400/405/500 Blood Gas Analyzers, medical devices used for blood sample analysis.

The weaknesses include a privilege escalation issue that can be exploited both locally and remotely, and the presence of a default account that allows attackers to access the device on TCP port 5900.

Siemens has also published an advisory for additional building automation products vulnerable to attacks due to the use of a Gemalto license management system (LMS).

The company said there was no evidence that any of these flaws had been exploited in the wild when the advisories were published.

Related: Serious Flaw Exposes Siemens Industrial Switches to Attacks

Original author: Eduard Kovacs