Critical OAS bugs open industrial systems to takeover

A pair of critical flaws in industrial Internet of Things data platform vendor Open Automation Software (OAS) are threatening industrial control systems (ICS), according to Cisco Talos.

They’re part of a group of eight vulnerabilities in OAS software that the vendor patched this week.

Among the flaws is one (CVE-2022-26082) that gives attackers the ability to remotely execute malicious code on a targeted machine to disrupt or alter its functioning; another (CVE-2022-26833) enables unauthenticated use of a REST application programming interface (API) for configuration and viewing data on systems.

In its advisory, Cisco Talos described the remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability as having a severity score of 9.1 on a 10-point scale and the API-related flaw as having a score of 9.4.

The remaining flaws exist in different components of OAS Platform V16.00.0112. They were assessed as being less severe (with vulnerability-severity ratings that range from 4.9 to 7.5), and included information disclosure issues, a denial-of-service flaw, and vulnerabilities that allow attackers to make unauthorized configuration changes and other modifications on vulnerable systems.

“Cisco Talos worked with Open Automation Software to ensure that these issues are resolved, and an update is available for affected customers, all in adherence to Cisco’s vulnerability disclosure policy,” its advisory noted. The company recommended that organizations using the vulnerable software ensure that proper network segmentation is in place to minimize the access that an attacker, who exploited the vulnerabilities, would have on the compromised network.

OAS’s Open Automation Software Platform is primarily designed to let organizations in industrial IoT environments move data between different platforms — for instance, from an Allen Bradley programmable logic controller (PLC) to a Siemens PLC. Central to the platform is a technology the company calls Universal Data Connect that enables data to flow from and between IoT devices, PLCs, applications, and databases.

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