Siemens Patches Major PLC Flaw that Bypasses Its 'Sandbox' Protection

Researchers from ICS security vendor Claroty published details on a serious vulnerability they found in Siemens SIMATIC S7-1200 and S7-1500 PLCs that could allow an attacker to gain remote access to protected memory areas of the popular programmable logic controllers.

Siemens today issued firmware updates for both PLC models that fix the memory-protection bypass flaw (CVE-2020-15782) - which scored a CVSS 8.1 severity rating - and plans to issue more updated mitigations "for products where updates are not, or not yet available," the company said.

"A remote unauthenticated attacker with network access to port 102/tcp could potentially write arbitrary data and code to protected memory areas or read sensitive data to launch further attacks," according to Siemens.

An attacker would need network access to the targeted PLCs as well as "PLC download rights," Claroty wrote in its blog post on the vuln, noting that there are no known attacks underway exploiting it.

Read the details about the research and the flaw here.