SQL Injection, XSS Flaws Found In Network Management System Products

Patches available for two flaws, pending for four others.

UPDATED DEC. 17 -- Security vendor Rapid7 today disclosed cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection vulnerabilities it found in network management system products from Spiceworks, Ipswitch, Castle Rock Computing, and Opsview.

Patches are currently available for two of the disclosed vulnerabilities. Two patches are pending from Castle Rock, which has yet to disclose a date when they would become available and Ipswitch, which was supposed to release patches for two flaws today but doesn’t appear to have done so.

In an alert, Rapid7 principal security research manager Tod Beardsley described network management systems as presenting a valuable target for attackers.

“By subverting these systems, and attacker can often pull an immense amount of valuable intelligence about the internal infrastructure,” he said. “The fact that many of these protocols are delivered over SNMP is also very interesting; too often, designers of management software which is intended for internal use don't consider the insider threat,” Beardsley wrote.

Beardsley told Dark Reading there’s a presumption within many organizations to implicitly trust data from an SNMP device simply because it is an internal protocol and the devices are assumed to be known devices. “You don’t usually think of SNMP data as user supplied, but that’s exactly what it is,” he says. “If I have a device on your network, I can say whatever I want to say.”

The Spiceworks vulnerability affects the company’s Spiceworks Desktop Web application. In its alert Rapid7 described the vulnerability as an XSS flaw resulting from insufficient filtering of data supplied via SNMP. The flaw, which has been patched, basically allows an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code in an authenticated user’s browser and use that access to launch further attacks.

Two of the vulnerabilities that Rapid7 disclosed this week affect the WhatsUpGold network monitoring and performance management product from Ipswitch. One of them is a persistent XSS flaw while the other is a SQL injection error. According to Rapid7, the XSS flaw in WhatsUpGold does not require the attacker to be authenticated and enables threat actors to steal data, modify system configurations, and generally take full control of a compromised system. The SQL injection error in WhatsUpGold requires an attacker to be authenticated to the system first but allows data to be extracted from the application’s underlying database.

An Ipswitch spokeswoman Thursday said the company has released a patch for the vulnerabilities identified by Rapid7.

“At Ipswitch, we take the security of our products very seriously. As soon as the vulnerability was detected, Ipswitch developed a fix which was released on December 16 and is now available to all customers through the customer portal," she said in an emailed statement.

Of the remaining three flaws, two were in Castle Rock’s SNMPc Enterprise and its SNMPc OnLine Web-based monitoring tool, respectively. As with Ipswitch, one of the flaws is a XSS error while the other is a SQL injection issue. The XSS flaw allows an unauthenticated attacker to compromise data and change system configuration while the SQL injection error enables access to the application’s database. Patches are pending for both flaws.

The sixth flaw, also an XSS error, exists in Opsview’s Web application component. The flaw lets attackers execute arbitrary code in an authenticated user’s browser session, which can then be used to launch further attacks on the Web application. Opsview has released a patch for the bug.

In order to exploit any of these flaws, an attacker would at minimum need to have some presence on the internal network, either via a previous compromise or by using a conference room or a waiting room to gain access, Beardsley says. The XSS flaws do not require the attacker to be authenticated on the network, while the SQL injection errors do require authentication and allow privilege escalation.

Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld, where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the publication. Over the course of his 20-year ... View Full Bio

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