ICS-SCADA

Experts found critical flaws in Rockwell FactoryTalk AssetCentre

Rockwell Automation has recently addressed nine critical vulnerabilities in its FactoryTalk AssetCentre product with the release of version v11.

The American provider of industrial automation Rockwell Automation on Thursday informed customers that it has patched nine critical vulnerabilities in its FactoryTalk AssetCentre product.

FactoryTalk AssetCentre provides customers with a centralized tool for securing, managing, versioning, tracking and reporting automation-related asset information across their entire facility.

All the vulnerabilities were discovered by security experts at industrial cybersecurity firm Claroty, ICS-CERT also published an advisory that provides details about the vulnerabilities and mitigation information.

The AssetCentre architecture is mainly composed of a main server, an MS-SQL server database, clients, and remote agents that run on engineering workstations (generally, Windows-based machines).

Each agent communicates with the centralized server and can accept and send commands to automation devices, such as PLCs.

“Claroty researchers were able to find deserialization vulnerabilities in a number of remoting services running on FactoryTalk AssetCentre, which handle inter-process communication within an OT network, as well as SQL-injection vulnerabilities in other service functions. These services run with the highest system privileges, meaning that any arbitrary code supplied by an attacker would also execute with those same privileges, allowing full access to the machine.” reads the advisory published by Claroty.

“Deserialization vulnerabilities, meanwhile, are a class of bugs that occur when an attacker is able to inject malicious code into a serialized object that would be executed later when being deserialized.”

The issues discovered by the researchers are deserialization and SLQ injection vulnerabilities, the the flaws have been rated with a CVSS score of 10.

Claroty experts explained that an unauthenticated, remote attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to take control of the centralized FactoryTalk AssetCentre Server and Windows-based engineering stations communicating with the server. Finally the attacker could own a facility’s entire operational technology (OT) network and run commands on server agents and automation devices such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs).

“Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities may allow unauthenticated attackers to perform arbitrary command execution, SQL injection, or remote code execution.” reads the advisory published by CISA.

The advisory published by Rockwell is available here.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, FactoryTalk AssetCentre)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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