⚠️ Region Alert: UAE/Middle East
Researchers from Palo Alto Networks and Siemens have disclosed a critical chain of three zero-day vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-40948, CVE-2025-40947, and CVE-2025-40949) affecting Siemens ROX II operational technology (OT) switches. These vulnerabilities allow an attacker to escalate privileges from initial reconnaissance to persistent root-level access, potentially compromising the integrity and availability of industrial control networks. The vulnerabilities range in severity from Medium to Critical, with the most severe carrying a CVSS score of 9.1.
The attack path involves leveraging an insecure configuration of the xz utility for arbitrary file disclosure, followed by a command injection vulnerability within the device's feature key validation function. Finally, the attacker can exploit the switch's task scheduler to inject malicious commands into the root cron table, ensuring persistence across system reboots. Siemens has released firmware version V2.17.1 to address these flaws, and organizations are urged to apply updates or implement virtual patching to secure their OT environments.
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