SCADA Security

Friday, October 10th, 2008

It is interesting to see how security research is a kind of a living being. Almost by nature security rearchers focus their efforts in whatever is more familiar to them, resulting in a vast amount of time dedicated to fairly accessible products such as Microsoft Windows operating systems, MS Office, Linux in its different flavours, etc.

This leaves a gap in the security industry where highly deployed systems (sometimes critical for government infrastructure) remain untested and its security is several years behind the avarage IT system.

Two clear examples of this are MPLS and SCADA systems. Given the fact that these systems are rarely found in penetration testing engagements and independent researchers struggle to find a suitable environment for testing, it doesn’t come to a surprise their security doesn’t match nowadays avarage.

Last week there was two vulnerabilities affecting SCADA systems:

• DATAC RealWin Preauth remote vulnerability, whereby a remote attacker can execute arbitrary code on the affected system.
• ABB PCU400 buffer overflow, whereby remote execution of arbitraty code is possible.

In a world where stack buffer overflows are among species threatened with extinction it is rather suprising reading this kind of vulnerabilities. There is no doubt that due to a number of circunstances security research has been appart from these technologies.

Tags: datac realwin, mpls, pcu400, Penetration Testing, scada, security, Vulnerabilities
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