DOS, Backdoor, and Easter Egg Found In Siemens S7

chicksdaddy writes with a post in Threat Post. From the article: "Dillon Beresford used a presentation at the Black Hat Briefings on Wednesday to detail more software vulnerabilities affecting industrial controllers from Siemens, including a serious remotely exploitable denial of service vulnerability, more hard-coded administrative passwords, and even an easter egg program buried in the code that runs industrial machinery around the globe. In an interview Tuesday evening, Beresford said he has reported 18 separate issues to Siemens and to officials at ICS CERT, the Computer Emergency Response Team for the Industrial Control Sector. Siemens said it is readying a patch for some of the holes, including one that would allow a remote attacker to gain administrative control over machinery controlled by certain models of its Step 7 industrial control software."

Comments

Re:Germans and humour...

[geekoid]

Adding more code to critical systems is NOT COOL. More bugs, more exploit. SCADA systems need to be developed by people who understand and enforce proper engineering and professionalism. This teenage hacker shot does NOT belong there.

IF the software industry would start enforcing engineering principles, most of these messes would even exist.

Re:Germans and humour...

[Infiniti2000]

Easter eggs are cool

No, Easter eggs (in software) are not cool. They cause problems in many ways.

1. Once discovered, they cause embarrassment to the employer.
2. They're a waste of resources (money) to the employer. The waste includes: time and money to actually implement or at a minimum opportunity cost for not working on real products, money spent removing the eggs, money spent repairing field items or possibly recall.
3. If discovered, the employee faces potentially significant consequences. Obviously, this is likely termination, but depending on the length of employment and other facts, this could also severely affect future employment opportunities.
4. This may do irreparable harm to the reputation of the employer. This could be long-lasting, too, as evidenced by your recollection of the Excel egg.
5. The egg itself may be a source of a security vulnerability.
6. The egg itself may have bugs and (besides a security vulnerability as mentioned above) cause a crash of the system.

Embedded systems may not need much of an OS

[tepples]

I didn't know Siemens S7 was running under ancient operating systems. :-)

I don't know about S7, never having used it. But you might be surprised about what sort of real-time control systems still run on operating systems like DOS, using the operating system solely as a vehicle for occasional access to storage, because DOS lets the program take over so much of the computer's execution. Google embedded dos and be surprised.

Re:Oh Good, A Backdoor

[tlhIngan]

Actually, I'd hazard a guess that MOST SCADA systems are vulnerable. These things weren't designed with security in mind - they're supposed to run off closed networks separated from the Internet (easily done - most of these things predate the Internet).

Heck, the biggest "security issue" would've been access via OPC ("OLE for Process Control" - yes, that same stuff Microsoft touted - "Object Linking and Embedding" from Windows 3.x).

And yeah, most industrial entities probably lack the proper IT team and infrastructure - after all, most of their work involved keeping the network up and running for the controllers, keeping OPC working. The someone demands Internet connectivity on their desktop and they set up routers and firewalls (and don't know about stuff like data diodes).

Basically, stuff that was never designed for security ends up on the Internet.

Queue Comments on Internet .. 3 .. 2 .. 1

[OzPeter]

Can we please get over the usual comments of "Why are these even connected to the Internet??!?!?!?"

As TFA points out, even air gapping the control and business networks doesn't always work. And in every plant I have worked in (except one*) over the last XXX number of years, I have been freely allowed to load up any file I wanted (using my own USB flash drive) into the control network. I believe my equipment is free of viruses, but with the sophistication of Stuxnet, who can tell what the next generation of industrial sabotage tools will be like and if/how they can be detected by current technology. So I can only assume that I have not caused any issues for my clients.

[*] The exception was a plant where there was some controls software running on a VM that was on a server under control of the IT department. The only way *I* could get files onto that box was to upload them to a public directory and let the corporate system check them and drop them off on the other side of the firewall. Unless of course I handed by USB key to the client and said "Can you directly drop these files on the server for me???"