By Eduard Kovacs on February 13, 2020
A serious vulnerability found in the Profinet industrial communication protocol exposes devices from Siemens, Moxa and possibly other vendors to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
The high-severity vulnerability was discovered last year by researchers at OTORIO, a company that provides industrial cybersecurity solutions. They discovered that an attacker can easily cause devices to enter a DoS condition — in some cases requiring a hard restart for recovery — by sending legitimate Profinet packets over the network.
According to OTORIO, the vulnerability is so easy to exploit that it may be triggered by accident by an employee who misconfigures the network. An attack can result in serious disruptions to operational processes.