CISA Warns of High-Severity Flaws in Schneider and GE Digital’s SCADA Software

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) last week published an industrial control system (ICS) advisory related to multiple vulnerabilities impacting Schneider Electric’s Easergy medium voltage protection relays.

“Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities may disclose device credentials, cause a denial-of-service condition, device reboot, or allow an attacker to gain full control of the relay,” the agency said in a bulletin on February 24, 2022. “This could result in loss of protection to your electrical network.”

The two high-severity weaknesses impact Easergy P3 versions prior to v30.205 and Easergy P5 versions before v01.401.101. Details of the flaws are as follows –

• CVE-2022-22722 (CVSS score: 7.5) – Use of hardcoded credentials that could be abused to observe and manipulate traffic associated with the device.
• CVE-2022-22723 and CVE-2022-22725 (CVSS score: 8.8) – A buffer overflow vulnerability that could result in program crashes and execution of arbitrary code by sending specially crafted packets to the relay over the network.

The flaws, which were discovered and reported by researchers Timothée Chauvin, Paul Noalhyt, Yuanshe Wu at Red Balloon Security, were addressed by Schneider Electric as part of updates pushed on January 11, 2022.

The advisory comes less than 10 days after CISA issued another alert warning of multiple critical vulnerabilities in Schneider Electric’s Interactive Graphical SCADA System (IGSS) that, if successfully exploited, could result in “disclosure of data and loss of control of the SCADA system with IGSS running in production mode.”

In related news, the U.S. federal agency also sounded the alarm related to General Electric’s Proficy CIMPLICITY SCADA software, warning of two security vulnerabilities that could be abused to reveal sensitive information, achieve code execution, and local privilege escalation.

The advisories follow a Year In Review report from industrial cybersecurity company Dragos, which found that 24% of the total 1,703 ICS/OT vulnerabilities reported in 2021 had no patches available, out of which 19% had no mitigation, preventing operators from taking any steps to safeguard their systems from potential threats.

Furthermore, Dragos identified malicious activity from three new groups that were found targeting ICS systems last year, including from that of actors it tracks as Kostovite, Erythrite, and Petrovite, each of which targeted the OT environments of renewable energy, electrical utility, and mining and energy firms located in Canada, Kazakhstan, and the U.S.