It is interesting to see how security research is a kind of a living being. Almost by nature security researchers focus their efforts in whatever is more familiar to them, resulting in a vast amount of time dedicated to fairly accessible products such as Microsoft Windows operating systems, MS Office, Linux in its different flavors, etc.
This leaves a gap in the security industry where highly deployed systems (sometimes critical for government infrastructure) remain untested and its security is several years behind the average IT system.
Two clear examples of this are MPLS and SCADA systems. Given the fact that these systems are rarely found in penetration testing engagements and independent researchers struggle to find a suitable environment for testing, it doesn’t come to a surprise their security doesn’t match nowadays average.
Last week there was two vulnerabilities affecting SCADA systems:
- DATAC RealWin Preauth remote vulnerability, whereby a remote attacker can execute arbitrary code on the affected system.
- ABB PCU400 buffer overflow, whereby remote execution of arbitrary code is possible.
In a world where stack buffer overflows are among species threatened with extinction it is rather surprising reading this kind of vulnerabilities. There is no doubt that due to a number of circumstances security research has been apart from these technologies.
