Critical unfixed flaws affect ABB Safety PLC Gateways

Researchers at Applied Risk discovered serious flaws in some PLC gateways manufactured by industrial tech company ABB. Security experts at Applied Risk are affected by potentially serious flaws and the bad news is that the vendor will not release firmware updates because the impacted products have reached the end of life. The security firm published a security advisory that […]

December 18, 2018

Researchers at Applied Risk discovered serious flaws in some PLC gateways manufactured by industrial tech company ABB.

Security experts at Applied Risk are affected by potentially serious flaws and the bad news is that the vendor will not release firmware updates because the impacted products have reached the end of life.

The security firm published a security advisory that provides technical details for two vulnerabilities in ABB Pluto Gateway products. GATE-E1 and GATE-E2 from ABB.

The ABB gateway solutions allow ABB PLCs to communicate with other control systems.

“Two vulnerabilities were found in the ABB GATE E1/E2 devices. These findings include a total lack ofauthentication for the administrative interfaces on the device, as well as an unauthenticated persistentCross-Site Scripting vulnerability.” reads the security advisory published by ABB.

“As a result of these findings, ABB has put the GATE-E2 in End-of-Life.The E1 device was already in EoL. “

The devices do not implement authentication on its administrative telnet/web interface, the flaws could be exploited to change device settings and cause a DoS condition by condition by continuously resetting the product.

Applied Risk assigned to the flaws a CVSS v3 base score of 9.8.

Experts also discovered a persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw that could be exploited by an attacker to inject malicious code via the administrative HTTP and telnet interfaces. The malicious is executed when a legitimate admin will access the device’s web portal. The flaw has been rated as a severity rating of “high.”

ABB also published separate advisories for the missing authentication and XSS vulnerabilities. ABB will send customers instructions on how to secure their installs.

The good news is that the experts are not aware of attacks exploiting the flaws in the wild.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – PLC Gateways, hacking)

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