CISA Warns of High-Severity Flaws in Schneider and GE Digital’s SCADA Software

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)
last week published an industrial control system (ICS^[1]) advisory related to
multiple vulnerabilities impacting Schneider Electric’s Easergy^[2]
medium voltage protection relays.

“Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities may disclose
device credentials, cause a denial-of-service condition, device
reboot, or allow an attacker to gain full control of the relay,”
the agency said^[3]
in a bulletin on February 24, 2022. “This could result in loss of
protection to your electrical network.”

The two high-severity weaknesses impact Easergy P3 versions
prior to v30.205 and Easergy P5 versions before v01.401.101.
Details of the flaws are as follows –

• CVE-2022-22722^[4] (CVSS score: 7.5) – Use
  of hardcoded credentials that could be abused to observe and
  manipulate traffic associated with the device.
• CVE-2022-22723^[5] and
  CVE-2022-22725^[6] (CVSS score: 8.8) – A
  buffer overflow vulnerability that could result in program crashes
  and execution of arbitrary code by sending specially crafted
  packets to the relay over the network.

The flaws, which were discovered and reported by researchers
Timothée Chauvin, Paul Noalhyt, Yuanshe Wu at Red Balloon Security,
were addressed by Schneider Electric as part of updates pushed on
January 11, 2022.

The advisory comes less than 10 days after CISA issued another
alert warning of multiple critical vulnerabilities^[7] in Schneider Electric’s
Interactive Graphical SCADA^[8]
System (IGSS^[9]) that, if successfully
exploited, could result in “disclosure of data and loss of control
of the SCADA system with IGSS running in production mode.”

In related news, the U.S. federal agency also sounded the alarm^[10] related to General
Electric’s Proficy CIMPLICITY^[11] SCADA software, warning
of two^[12] security^[13] vulnerabilities that
could be abused to reveal sensitive information, achieve code
execution, and local privilege escalation.

The advisories follow a Year In
Review^[14] report from industrial
cybersecurity company Dragos, which found that 24% of the total
1,703 ICS/OT vulnerabilities reported in 2021 had no patches
available, out of which 19% had no mitigation, preventing operators
from taking any steps to safeguard their systems from potential
threats.

Furthermore, Dragos identified malicious activity from three new
groups that were found targeting ICS systems last year, including
from that of actors it tracks as Kostovite, Erythrite, and
Petrovite, each of which targeted the OT environments of renewable
energy, electrical utility, and mining and energy firms located in
Canada, Kazakhstan, and the U.S.