Critical Infrastructure exploitable vulnerability will not be patched

David Heath
Wednesday, 09 November 2011 19:51

Business IT - Security

In April this year, a vulnerability was discovered in a commonly used critical infrastructure Web Access product.  Exploitable code was also made available.  The manufacturer has announced that no patch will be released.

According to ISC-CERT, advisory ICSA-11-094-02A spells out the following:

'Independent security researcher Rubén Santamarta has identified details and released exploit code for a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) vulnerability in Advantech/BroadWin WebAccess. This is a web browser-based human-machine interface (HMI) product. This RPC vulnerability affects the WebAccess Network Service on 4592/TCP and allows remote code execution.

'Advantech/BroadWin has notified ICS-CERT that a patch will not be issued to address this vulnerability.'

Allow me to repeat that.  A simple RPC exploit in software that is used for a variety of critical infrastructure projects WILL NOT BE PATCHED.

Worse, the company continues to sell the product with absolutely no advice on its web site (visible to this writer) that there is an issue.

Well-known SCADA security expert Dale Peterson was so astonished by this action that he was moved to create a new Insecure Products List currently with just one entry.

Peterson's thoughts are on the next page.