Thousands of SCADA, ICS Devices Exposed Through Serial Ports

Trailrunner7 writes "Serial port servers are admittedly old school technology that you might think had been phased out as new IT, SCADA and industrial control system equipment has been phased in. Metasploit creator HD Moore cautions you to think again. Moore recently revealed that through his Critical IO project research, he discovered 114,000 such devices connected to the Internet, many with little in the way of authentication standing between an attacker and a piece of critical infrastructure or a connection onto a corporate network. More than 95,000 of those devices were exposed over mobile connections such as 3G or GPRS. 'The thing that opened my eyes was looking into common configurations; even if it required authentication to manage the device itself, it often didn't require any authentication to talk to the serial port which is part of the device,' Moore told Threatpost. 'At the end of the day, it became a backdoor to huge separate systems that shouldn't be online anyway. Even though these devices do support authentication at various levels, most of the time it wasn't configured for the serial port.'"

Comments

Dupe

[hackshack]

Jan 10: Thousands of SCADA Devices Discovered on the Open Internet

Best part is, it's the same submitter. And y'all wonder why /. is dying.

Re:Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a dupe. The SCADA segment bit is overlap, but the access method is different. This issue applies to more than SCADA, some thousands of unsecured serial port proxies were actually modern Linux and FreeBSD serial consoles, conveniently preauthenticated as root.

Ubiquitous internet actually makes this worse

[mpoulton]

Back in the olden days, equipment like this had serial port configuration interfaces which were intended for use by nearby administrators, via terminals and small local networks with no connectivity beyond the local facility. If longer distance administration was required, it was over dedicated copper loops. The internet was simply not used for these kinds of systems, and the idea that those devices would ever end up on a globally-accessible network with millions of untrusted devices was incomprehensible. As technology developed and the internet took over as the primary means of long-distance networked communication, these legacy devices were incorporated into a network environment that their engineers had never even considered. It's just not what they were made for. The devices are not to blame. Engineers and administrators who put them on public networks certainly are.

Re:Ubiquitous internet actually makes this worse

[Darinbob]

Don't treat these all as legacy devices either. Brand new devices manufactured today still have serial ports. They're often on protocols other than a simple command line, and an RS232 or RS485 connection are robust and versatile.

The alternative to a serial port with command line? Ethernet with command line, which is every bit as insecure. All the article really points out is that sometimes people forget about security, since there is nothing inherently insecure about a serial port. I just read this as people being surprised that technology from the past is still in use; next up complaints about how we still use archaic concepts like the wheel, inclined plane, and lever.

Ie, get a secure connection to the terminal server, then normal serial port to the actual device. No one is going to be snooping on the serial line itself any more than they'd be snooping on the ethernet cable. The insecure part is the internet.

Re:Ubiquitous internet actually makes this worse

[perpenso]

That's the issue when people use security by obscurity. The obscurity was the difficulty in networking the serial port. Anything made in the past 20 years should have had an Ethernet port and real security. Yes, even this SCADA stuff.

Its more security through physical access, not so much obscurity. The original intent was probably to give a tech in the room, or a user in a nearby room, access. Also its the ease of turning a serial port into a remote connection that is at the heart of the problem.

YMMV but such stuff I worked on in the 90s had multilevel (user, tech, admin, ...) passwords, even on serial port access. Ethernet or serial port, it makes no difference when the site does not change the passwords from their factory settings.

Re:Ubiquitous internet actually makes this worse

[fluffy99]

In the systems I've seen, they are using stuff like MoxaPorts for serial to ethernet. It's done as either serial to serial tunneling over ethernet, or one side is a computer with the lantronix serial redirector client installed. The devices require a password to configure, but typically access to the serial port is simply telneting to port 10001 and there is zero security unless the serial port on the device has access controls. Engineers like the simplicity of setting it up and usually don't consider that everyone else on the network can too.

Re:How is this news?

[dreamchaser]

Try to convince an old plant manager he needs vpn. Try to explain to him what one is.

It isn't as hard as you might think. "Do you lock the door to your house? A VPN is like that for your data."

It isn't a great analogy but trust me, it works. I've used it quite a few times.

Define "old" ...

[perpenso]

Try to convince an old plant manager he needs vpn. Try to explain to him what one is.

Define "old". Some 50 year olds were playing with TRS-80, Commodore PET and Apple II computers when they were kids in high school. I think we are at, or soon will be, past the point where "old" equates to unfamiliarity with digital technology.

Re: How is this news?

[dogsbreath]

er. . . Typically these are tied to dial up modems or to IP port servers. They are used to access systems when the secure front door is unavailable due to Internet outages, firewall problems or the access gateway being unavailable.

You would not think anyone would be so dumb to set these up but sone may be legacy, or put in place by a local hero sysadmin.

It may even be, get this, a contractually required remote support access point. Many vendors have a very limited concept of what is required to prevent unauthorized access. One vendor sales guy told me that it was secure because no one would know about the dial up number and they had no reported break ins at other installations.

Sigh.

Of course there are ways of providing secure alternative access paths but there are a lot of folk who are under the impression that obscurity is sufficient.

Another issue besides the lack of authentication is the lack of logging and activity reporting. One outfit I did some work for spent a dinghy full of large bills on an IPS for the network side but would not pay for caller ID on their dial-up access point. Against their financial responsibility policy to pay for frivilous monthly charges.