"Research Reveals Dangerous Design Flaws and Vulnerabilities in Legacy Programming Languages"
Trend Micro shared new research conducted in collaboration with Politecnico di Milano that brings further attention to the design flaws in legacy languages and introduces new secure coding guidelines. The study provides details about how design flaws in legacy programming languages such as RAPID, KRL, AS, PDL2, and PacScript could lead to the development of vulnerable automation programs. These vulnerabilities could allow attackers to take over industrial robots and automation machines to interfere with operations and steal intellectual property. Researchers also demonstrated the creation of a new type of self-propagating malware using one of the legacy programming languages. This article continues to discuss new research on the potential exploitation and impact of design flaws in legacy languages, the importance of upfront secure development in the industrial automation world, network-security best practices for that Industry 4.0 developers, and a new tool developed to detect malicious code in task programs.