A vulnerability has been identified in SIMATIC BATCH V9.1 (All versions), SIMATIC Information Server 2020 (All versions), SIMATIC Information Server 2022 (All versions), SIMATIC PCS 7 V9.1 (All versions < V9.1 SP2 UC06), SIMATIC Process Historian 2020 (All versions), SIMATIC Process Historian 2022 (All versions), SIMATIC WinCC Runtime Professional V18 (All versions < V18 Update 5), SIMATIC WinCC Runtime Professional V19 (All versions < V19 Update 3), SIMATIC WinCC V7.4 (All versions), SIMATIC WinCC V7.5 (All versions < V7.5 SP2 Update 18), SIMATIC WinCC V8.0 (All versions < V8.0 Update 5). The affected products run their DB server with elevated privileges which could allow an authenticated attacker to execute arbitrary OS commands with administrative privileges.
The product performs an operation at a privilege level that is higher than the minimum level required, which creates new weaknesses or amplifies the consequences of other weaknesses.
New weaknesses can be exposed because running with extra privileges, such as root or Administrator, can disable the normal security checks being performed by the operating system or surrounding environment. Other pre-existing weaknesses can turn into security vulnerabilities if they occur while operating at raised privileges. Privilege management functions can behave in some less-than-obvious ways, and they have different quirks on different platforms. These inconsistencies are particularly pronounced if you are transitioning from one non-root user to another. Signal handlers and spawned processes run at the privilege of the owning process, so if a process is running as root when a signal fires or a sub-process is executed, the signal handler or sub-process will operate with root privileges.