CODESYS Patches Dozen Vulnerabilities in Industrial Automation Products

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Industrial automation software provider CODESYS this month informed customers about a dozen vulnerabilities affecting various products. More than half of these flaws were discovered by Cisco Talos and their details were disclosed on Monday.

Vulnerabilities in CODESYS software could have serious implications considering that it’s used in the industrial control systems (ICS) made by several major companies. Last month, a cybersecurity firm warned that programmable logic controllers (PLCs) made by over a dozen manufacturers were exposed to attacks due to critical security bugs discovered in CODESYS software.

CODESYS on July 22 published six new advisories to inform customers that patches are available for remote code execution, denial of service (DoS), and information disclosure vulnerabilities affecting its Development System, V3 web server, Gateway, Runtime Toolkit for VxWorks, and EtherNetIP products.

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Only one vulnerability has been assigned a critical severity rating. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2021-33485, has been described as a heap-based buffer overflow in the CODESYS V3 web server, which can be exploited for DoS attacks or remote code execution using specially crafted requests.

CODESYS also published an advisory describing seven vulnerabilities discovered by Cisco’s Talos research and threat intelligence unit. Talos researchers found that various functions of the CODESYS Development System, a programming tool for industrial control and automation systems, are affected by unsafe deserialization bugs that can lead to remote code execution.

An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities by somehow modifying local configuration or profile files, or by tricking a local user into opening malicious project or archive files.

The vendor said it had not been aware of any attacks exploiting these vulnerabilities, but for some flaws it noted that security scanners can cause problems.

In each advisory, CODESYS mentioned that the vulnerabilities can be exploited by an attacker with low skills.

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

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