CVE-2017-16718 — Beckhoff TwinCAT 3 supports communication over ADS

Beckhoff TwinCAT 3 supports communication over ADS. ADS is a protocol for industrial automation in protected environments. This protocol uses user configured routes, that can be edited remotely via ADS. This special command supports encrypted authentication with username/password

01What is this vulnerability?

Beckhoff TwinCAT 3 supports communication over ADS. ADS is a protocol for industrial automation in protected environments. This protocol uses user configured routes, that can be edited remotely via ADS. This special command supports encrypted authentication with username/password. The encryption uses a fixed key, that could be extracted by an attacker. Precondition of the exploitation of this…

02Affected products

Vendor	Product	Versions
ICS-CERT	Beckhoff TwinCAT	Version 3

03Active exploitation status

Not currently listed on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. EPSS is the best forward-looking signal — see the EPSS row above.

04Recommended remediation

• Patch to a fixed version listed in the vendor advisory (see references below).
• Mitigate with WAF rules, network egress filters, or feature flags where the patch is not yet available.
• Hunt historical logs for exploitation indicators — see Detection signatures below.

05Technical details

For the full vendor write-up, exploit chains, and reference implementations, see the references list in section 09.

06Detection signatures

Ask SARA in chat to draft a starting detection for this CVE in your stack of choice.

07Related CVEs

No directly-cited follow-up CVEs in the KB record for this advisory. The references list in section 09 carries the vendor cross-references.

08Timeline

• Published: 2018-06-27T19:00:00.000Z
• Last modified: 2024-09-16T17:28:00.754Z

09References

• download.beckhoff.com — https://download.beckhoff.com/download/Document/product-security/Advisories/advi…