Critical SolarWinds RCE bugs enable unauthorized network takeover

Eight newly discovered vulnerabilities in the SolarWinds Access Rights Manager Tool (ARM) — including three deemed to be of critical severity — could open the door for attackers to gain the highest levels of privilege in any unpatched systems.

As a broad IT management platform, SolarWinds occupies a uniquely sensitive place in corporate networks, as the world learned the hard way three years ago. Its power to oversee and affect critical components in a corporate network is nowhere better epitomized than in its ARM tool, which administrators use to provision, manage, and audit user access rights to data, files, and systems.

So, admins should take note that on Thursday, Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) revealed a series of “High” and “Critical”-rated vulnerabilities in ARM. As Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at the ZDI, explains, “The most severe of these bugs would allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code at system level. They could completely take over an affected system. While we did not look at exploitability, the potential of these vulnerabilities is about as bad as it gets.”

Serious Issues in SolarWinds ARM

Two of the eight vulnerabilities — CVE-2023-35181 and CVE-2023-35183 — allow unauthorized users to abuse local resources and incorrect folder permissions to perform local privilege escalation. Each was assigned a “High” severity rating of 7.8 out of 10.

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