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.

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.