To answer that question, let us first tell you that VxWorks is the world’s most widely used operating system. So prevalent is its use that you can find this OS in over 2 billion devices around the world, including medical and industrial devices.
The Armis research team, Armis Labs, have discovered 11, zero day vulnerabilities in VxWorks, thus the moniker, ” Urgent 11″. These VxWorks vulnerability, according to Armis Lab, reside in VxWorks’ TCP/IP stack (IPnet), impacting all versions since version 6.5, and are a rare example of vulnerabilities found to affect the operating system over the last 13 years.
Armis has worked closely with Wind River, the maintainer of VxWorks, and the latest VxWorks 7 released on July 19 contains fixes for all the discovered vulnerabilities.
The VxWorks vulnerability seems to be quite a problem, going by what Armis has posted.
Six of the vulnerabilities are classified as critical and enable Remote Code Execution (RCE).
The remaining are classified as denial of service, information leaks or logical flaws.
Armis says Urgent/11 is “serious” as it enables attackers to take over devices with no user interaction required, and even bypass perimeter security devices such as firewalls and NAT solutions.
These traits “make these vulnerabilities ‘wormable,’ meaning they can be used to propagate malware into and within networks.” Such an attack has a severe potential, resembling that of the EternalBlue vulnerability, used to spread the WannaCry malware.
Here’s more on Urgent 11.
Image Credit: Armis Lab