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Vulnerabilities in industrial cellular routers’ cloud management platforms

OTORIO, a provider of operational technology (OT) cyber and digital risk management solutions, announced that three significant industrial cellular router vendors have vulnerabilities in their cloud management platforms that expose customers’ operational networks to external attack. This raises questions about the safety of connecting OT to the cloud and suggests a need for standard industry regulations to eliminate such security risks.

An industrial cellular router allows multiple devices to connect to the internet from a cellular network. It is commonly used in industrial settings, such as manufacturing plants or oil rigs, where traditional wired internet connections may not be available or reliable. Vendors of these devices employ cloud platforms to provide customers with remote management, scalability, analytics and security.

However, OTORIO’s research found 11 vulnerabilities in the cloud platforms studied, allowing remote code execution and full control over hundreds of thousands of devices and OT networks – in some cases, even those not actively configured to use the cloud.

OTORIO Security Researcher, Roni Gavrilov, shared key findings and remediation tips at Black Hat Asia 2023 (a white paper on the topic is available here).

“As the deployment of IIoT devices becomes more popular, it's important to be aware that their cloud management platforms may be targeted by threat actors,” said Gavrilov. “A single IIoT vendor platform being exploited could act as a pivot point for attackers, accessing thousands of environments at once.”

OTORIO discovered a wide range of attack vectors based on the security level of the vendor's cloud platform, including several vulnerabilities in M2M (machine-to-machine) protocols and weak asset registration mechanisms. In some cases, these security gaps enable attackers to:

• Gain root access through a reverse-shell.

• Compromise devices in the production network, facilitating unauthorised access and control with root privileges.

• Compromise devices, exfiltrate sensitive information, and perform operations such as shutdown.

Some attacks require identifiers like Media Access Control (MAC) address, serial number or International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) to breach cloud-connected devices, but others do not. One serious issue affecting all three vendors is that their platforms expose devices that have not been configured to use the cloud. Furthermore, breaches of these devices may bypass all the security layers in the Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture Model for several different vendors.

Find out more at www.otorio.com

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