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Eight zero-day vulnerabilities affecting a popular industrial control provided by Carrier have been identified and patched, according to security researchers from Trellix who discovered the issues.
The vulnerabilities affect the LenelS2 Mercury access control panel, which is used to grant physical access to facilities and integrate with more complex building automation deployments.
Carrier’s LenelS2 Mercury access control panels are widely used across hundreds of companies in the healthcare, education, and transportation industries as well as federal government agencies and organizations.
Trellix said they combined both known and novel techniques that allowed them to hack the system, achieve root access to the device’s operating system and pull firmware for emulation and vulnerability discovery.
Carrier associate director of product security architecture Joshua Jessurun disputed the idea that these are zero-day vulnerabilities but told The Record that his team worked with Trellix on remediating the issues and released an advisory with detailed guidelines on what users need to do to address the vulnerabilities. Some of the issues need to be mitigated while most are addressed in firmware updates.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released its own advisory on the issues – which are tagged as CVE-2022-31479, CVE-2022-31480, CVE-2022-31481, CVE-2022-31482, CVE-2022-31483, CVE-2022-31484, CVE-2022-31485, CVE-2022-31486 – with most carrying CVSS scores above 7.5.
CISA explained that exploitation of the bugs would give “an attacker access to the device, allowing monitoring of all communications sent to and from the device, modification of onboard relays, changing of configuration files, device instability, and a denial-of-service condition.”
Trellix security researchers Steve Povolny and Sam Quinn said they “anticipated a strong potential for finding vulnerabilities, knowing that the access controller was running a Linux Operating System and root access to the board could be achieved by leveraging classic hardware hacking techniques.”
“While we believed flaws could be found, we did not…
TXOne Networks CEO Terence Liu speaks at the 2021 Hacks in Taiwan Conference. Credit: TXOne Networks
Bolstering operational technology (OT) security is a budding awareness among semiconductor suppliers, as the manufacturing industry has become the most popular target of hackers, according to Terence Liu, CEO of TXOne Networks.
‘Threat landscape has changed’
Ten years ago, few people cared about the manufacturing industry’s information security because hackers usually attacked financial and government sectors and no law pushed manufacturers to improve security, Liu said during a video interview with DIGITIMES Asia.
However, the “threat landscape” has changed, Liu said, citing a report released by IBM, which provides threat analysis and response services.
“Manufacturing replaced financial services as the top attacked industry in 2021, representing 23.2% of the attacks [IBM’s] X-Force remediated last year,” IBM said in the report in March. “Sixty-one percent of incidents at OT-connected organizations last year were in the manufacturing industry.”
The capital flow of hackers is harder to track now when their payments are made in virtual coins, Liu said.
OT akin to IT
As manufacturers are automating more production facilities, their OT networks have become similar to IT settings, meaning the two environments are no longer fully separated as in the pre-digital era, Liu said.
In the industry 4.0 era, the seclusion of OT systems is almost untenable as more production facilities – ranging from machines, and manufacturing execution systems, to cloud servers – become interconnected. The COVID-19 pandemic has also compelled manufacturers to open internal networks for remote workers, creating more opportunities for hackers, he observed.
Hackers usually ransom manufacturers in two ways. They may steal companies’ data related to clients and threaten to publish the data. Or, they may attack manufacturers’ OT systems to disrupt production activities. Manufacturers would suffer more losses if they halt operations longer, Liu said.
SEMI E187 specification
On August 3, 2018, TSMC encountered attacks by computer virus, “which affected a number of computer systems and fab tools in…
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