According to the US government's CISA and private security researchers, 56 vulnerabilities have been discovered in industrial operational technology (OT) systems from ten global manufacturers, including Honeywell, Ericsson, Motorola, and Siemens, putting more than 30,000 devices worldwide at risk.
Some of these flaws obtained CVSS severity ratings as high as 9.8 out of 10. This is especially unfortunate given that these devices are employed in vital infrastructure throughout the oil and gas, chemical, nuclear, power generation and distribution, manufacturing, water treatment and distribution, mining, and construction and automation industries.
Remote code execution (RCE) and firmware vulnerabilities are the most serious security problems. If exploited, these flaws might allow criminals to shut down electricity and water infrastructure and damage the food supply.
This is not to claim that all or any of these situations are practically achievable; rather, these are the kind of devices and processes involved.
Forescout's Vedere Labs uncovered the flaws in devices produced by 10 vendors and used by the security firm's customers and termed them OT:ICEFALL. As per the researchers, the vulnerabilities affect at least 324 enterprises worldwide – a figure that is likely to be far higher in reality because Forescout only has access to its own clients' OT devices.
In addition to the previously mentioned firms, the researchers discovered weaknesses in Bently Nevada, Emerson, JTEKT, Omron, Phoenix Contact, and Yokogawa devices.
OT Devices are insecure by design
The majority of issues are found in level 1 and level 2 OT devices. Physical processes are controlled by level 1 devices such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and remote terminal units (RTUs), whereas level 2 devices include supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and human-machine interface systems.
In addition to the 56 highlighted in a Vedere report today, the threat-hunting team uncovered four more that are still being kept under wraps owing to responsible disclosure. One of the four allows an attacker to compromise credentials, two let an attacker to change the firmware of OT systems, and the fourth is an RCE through memory write flaw.
Many of these flaws are the consequence of OT products' "insecure-by-design" build, according to Forescout's head of security research Daniel dos Santos. Several OT devices lack fundamental security protections, making them simpler for criminals to exploit, he said.
Since that earlier analysis, "there have been real-word real incidents, real malware that has abused insecure-by-design functionality of devices to cause disruption and physical damage, like Industroyer in Ukraine in 2016, or Triton in the Middle East in 2017. One instance of insecure-by-design is unauthenticated protocols. So basically, whenever you interact with the device you can call sensitive functions on the device, invoke this function directly without it asking for a password," dos Santos stated.
The security researchers found nine vulnerabilities related to protocols that have no authentication on them: CVE-2022-29953, CVE-2022-29957, CVE-2022- 29966, CVE-2022-30264, CVE-2022-30313, CVE-2022-30317, CVE-2022-29952 and CVE-2022-30276.
The majority of these may be used to download and run firmware and logic on other people's devices, resulting in RCEs, or shutdowns and reboots that can create a denial of service circumstances. In an ideal world, equipment employing these protocols is not linked to computers and other systems in such a way that a network intruder may abuse them.
Credential compromise: Most common issue
Five of the flaws were noted more than once by Vedere Labs because they had various possible consequences.
More than a third of the 56 vulnerabilities (38%) can be exploited to compromise user login credentials, while 21% might allow a criminal to change the firmware if exploited, and 14% are RCEs.
Other vulnerability categories include denial of service and configuration manipulation (eight percent), authentication bypass (six percent), file manipulation (three percent), and logic manipulation (two percent).
Fixing these security flaws will be difficult, according to the researchers, since they are the consequence of OT products being vulnerable by design, or because they need modifications in device firmware and supported protocols.
As a result, they did not reveal all of the technical information for the faulty OT devices, which explains the lack of depth. They did, however, advise users to read each vendor's security advisory, which is expected to be released today or soon. Furthermore, where possible, the security shop suggests disconnecting OT and industrial control system networks from corporate networks and the internet.
