Vulnerability Lets Hackers Control Building Locks, Electricity, Elevators and More

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/02/tridium-niagara-zero-day/

By Kim Zetter
Threat Level
Wired.com
02.06.13

SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO -- A critical vulnerability discovered in an industrial 
control system used widely by the military, hospitals and others would allow 
attackers to remotely control electronic door locks, lighting systems, 
elevators, electricity and boiler systems, video surveillance cameras, alarms 
and other critical building facilities, say two security researchers.

The vulnerability in the Tridium Niagara AX Framework allows an attacker to 
remotely access the system’s config.bog file, which holds all of the system’s 
configuration data, including usernames and passwords to log in to the 
framework and control systems managed by it.

Billy Rios and Terry McCorkle, noted security researchers with Cylance, who 
have found numerous vulnerabilities in the Tridium system and other industrial 
control systems in the last two years, demonstrated a zero-day attack on the 
system at the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summmit on Tuesday. The attack 
exploits a remote, pre-authenticated vulnerability that, combined with a 
privilege-escalation bug, gave them root on the system’s platform, which 
underlies the devices.

“The platform is written in Java, which is really, really good from an 
exploitation standpoint,” Rios said. “Once we can own the platform, a lot of 
the other stuff is very, very straightforward [to attack].”

[...]

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