Popular Niagara system vulnerable to attack from hackers, warns US Homeland Security

Washington -  A popular software system, which helps organizations around the world to manage millions of machines and devices over the Internet, is vulnerable to attack from hackers, the US Department of Homeland Security has warned.

The software system called the Niagara Framework enables corporate, military, health-care and other users to remotely control or monitor medical devices, elevators, video cameras, security systems and a wide array of other sensitive operations.

Cyber security officials said that Niagara users should immediately prohibit guest users, bolster passwords, cut off direct access to the Internet and take other steps to prevent hackers from exploiting configuration and software flaws.

"Disable the 'guest' and 'demo' user accounts if enabled," said the alert, issued by the department's Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team.

According to the Washington Post, the alert advised other steps such as, locking out accounts that receive excessive invalid login attempts, using stronger passwords, changing default user names and passwords, and limiting user access to the file system.

The alert follows a report that described Niagara and the vulnerabilities, which were discovered by two security specialists Billy Rios and Terry McCorkle.

They alert said that the system is vulnerable to a "directory traversal attack," a well-known technique among hackers.

The attack could enable an intruder to access files containing user names and passwords, it added.