Customers of Dell devices might be exposed to cyber-attacks, as the pre-installed software includes vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to disable security solutions and to escalate privileges.
Marcin ‘Icewall’ Noga of Cisco Talos has discovered 3 different vulnerabilities affecting select Dell systems, urging customers to install the latest updates as soon as possible to prevent attacks.
First and foremost, there’s a privilege escalation vulnerability documented in CVE-2016-9038 and which exists in the SboxDrv.sys driver. The researcher says the security flaw can be exploited by sending crafted data to the \Device\SandboxDriverApi device driver because it provides read and write rights to everyone. A successful attack could lead to local privilege escalation, the researcher notes, adding that Invincea-X and Dell Protected Workspace 6.1.3-24058 are both vulnerable.
"Patch, patch, patch"
Then, it’s CVE-2016-8732, which is a protection bypass vulnerability. This time, the vulnerable software is Dell Protected Workspace 5.1.1-22303, whose InvProtectDrv.sys driver file contains multiple vulnerabilities.
“Due to weak restrictions on the driver communications channel, as well as insufficient validation, an attacker controlled application that is executed on an affected system could leverage this driver to effectively disable some of the protection mechanisms provided by the software,” the security report reads.
The Dell Protected Workspace solution is primarily aimed at enterprises, so IT pros and CIOs should rush to install version 6.3.0 of the software, which is said to patch the vulnerability.
And last but not least, CVE-2017-2802 describes another protection bypass vulnerability, this time affecting the Dell PPO Service that’s part of the Dell Precision Optimizer app. It appears that the poaService.exe looks for a DLL library called atiadlxx.dll, and by deploying a crafted version of the file on the target systems attackers could enable execution of arbitrary code. The issue has been patched in version 4.0 of the application.
It goes without saying that customers need to install all the available updates as soon as possible, though for the time being Dell is not aware of any exploits based on these vulnerabilities.
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