Two newly discovered vulnerabilities have been classified with a maximum CVSS Score of 10 and users of Schneider Electric ETG3000 FactoryCast HMI Gateway should take immediate action to protect SCADA systems from attack.

The vulnerabilities concern hard-coded FTP credentials, assigned CVE-2014-9198, which effectively bypasses any authentication requirement for access. At the same time, a critical Java configuration file - rde.jar - has been found to be accessible without authentication, potentially allowing the gateway configuration to be overridden. This latter vulnerability has been assigned CVE-2014-9197.

Remediation and mitigation advice has already been provided, requiring a firmware upgrade for the gateway.

For NERC CIP Version 5 compliance maintaining cyber security is of paramount importance and the protection of SCADA and other BES systems is essential. As more emphasis is placed on critical infrastructure protection it is inevitable that more vulnerabilities will be discovered, and in turn, sharpening the classic 'double-edged sword' of vulnerability management: as soon as a vulnerability is discovered and understood, remediation or mitigation steps can be provided, however, the disclosure process also makes the vulnerability widely known to would-be attackers too, compounding and increasing the threat.

Correct operation of NERC CIP-007-3 compliance would have identified the use of FTP for the gateway. The CIP-007 requirement questions the necessity of any open ports such as this and where the service or port is deemed essential, compensating security controls should be implemented. So in this example, internal firewalling in line with CIP-005-5 compliance should have been operated to ensure that only controlled, limited access to the FTP service was allowed - often the use of a 'jump server' is a good idea to limit access to only specified devices and IP addresses, providing extra layers of access control.

For more background to the vulnerabilities CVE-2014-9197 and CVE-2014-9198, and the remediation advice see the ICS-CERTAdvisory (ICSA-15-020-02) 

 

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