Cisco Industrial Network Director found containing major security bugs

• Cisco identified three security flaws in the software which is designed for managing industrial networks.
• Among the three, one was marked “high severity” and could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code.

Cisco has identified three security bugs in Industrial Network Director (IND) software. In a series of security advisories released on Wednesday, Cisco addressed these major flaws present in IND. One of these flaws was a “high severity” remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability that could allow threat actors to execute arbitrary code with elevated privileges.

Cisco IND is a software designed to manage industrial networks and helps monitor automated devices in an industrial network.

Key highlights

• The RCE flaw, designated as CVE-2019-1861, had a CVSS score of 7.2. The flaw was the result of a file validation issue in IND. In an advisory, Cisco mentions that an attacker could exploit this flaw by authenticating to an affected system using administrator-level privileges and subsequently uploading arbitrary files.
• The other two flaws identified by Cisco are a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw and a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability. While the XSS flaw enables attackers to send malicious requests, the CSRF vulnerability allows anyone to perform arbitrary actions on the affected systems.
• Cisco has released software updates for the RCE flaw. However, XSS and CSRF flaws are still left unpatched.

Worth noting

Apart from addressing IND flaws, Cisco has also released security updates for various products that had security holes. The products patched are Cisco Unified Communications Manager IM and Presence Service, Cisco TelePresence Video Communication Server, Cisco Expressway Series, Cisco Enterprise Chat and Email Center, Cisco Unified Computing System, Cisco IOS XR, and Cisco Webex Meetings Server.