Vulnerabilities in industrial gas detectors require little skill to exploit

Gas detectors used in factories and other industrial settings to identify toxic conditions contain several vulnerabilities that can allow hackers to remotely sabotage the devices, according to an industry advisory published late last week.

The vulnerabilities in the Midas and Midas Black gas detectors manufactured by Honeywell can be exploited by hackers with a low skill level, according to the advisory, which was published Thursday by the Industrial Control System Cyber Emergency Response Team. The first weaknesses is a "path traversal" weakness, which allows remote attackers to bypass the normal authentication system. A second one results in the failure to encrypt user passwords when they're being transmitted.