CriticalCVE-2022-29303

    SolarView Compact Command Injection Vulnerability (CVE-2022-29303)

    Published In CISA KEV since Sources: pwn.watch, CVE.org

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    What is affected, what to do

    SolarView Compact ver.6.00 was discovered to contain a command injection vulnerability via conf_mail.php.

    The vulnerability is being actively exploited; treat it as a priority. The available sources name no fixed version. Check the vendor guidance in the references below. Immediate actions, mitigation and detection rules are in the runbook below.

    Affected
    • Contec Sv-cpt-mc310 Firmware eq 6.00..6.00

    Not sure whether and how you are affected? Ask a question about this vulnerability

    Metrics

    9.8

    Priority

    XIEM Effective CVSS: highest available CVSS rating from NVD and vendor data.

    Source: NVD, CVSS v3

    9.8

    CVSS v3

    Severity Critical on the scale from 0 to 10.

    Source: pwn.watch, CVE.org

    98.0 %

    EPSS score

    High — model estimates ≥ 50% chance of real-world exploitation within 30 days.

    Source: FIRST EPSS, percentile 99.91

    Show all metrics
    Severity
    Critical
    Priority (0–325)

    The priority score is a consolidated metric that condenses several individual signals into a single, action-guiding ranking: technical severity (CVSS), exploitation likelihood (EPSS), known-exploited status (KEV) and the context of the affected asset. The aim is to answer the only truly important question in vulnerability management: what first?

    Read in glossary
    229.66 Methodology
    Exploit maturity

    An exploit is code or a technique that specifically uses a concrete vulnerability to force unintended behaviour — such as executing code or escalating privileges. It is the tool that turns a theoretical flaw into a practical attack.

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    actively exploited
    XIEM Effective CVSS

    XIEM® is the tiered managed-security operating model from NEOSEC and a registered trademark of NEOSEC GmbH. It extends classic SIEM — the central collection, normalisation and correlation of security-relevant events — with endpoint forensics, network visibility and deception technology, and consolidates them into three building tiers: Sentry, Orchestrate and Command.

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    9.8 Methodology
    CVSS v3

    CVSS is the globally established, open standard for assessing the technical severity of a vulnerability on a scale from 0 to 10. It describes how easily a flaw can be exploited and what damage it can cause — but not how likely its actual exploitation is. CVSS and the complementary EPSS deliberately answer different questions.

    Read in glossary
    9.8
    EPSS score

    The EPSS score is the absolute model output for an individual vulnerability: the estimated probability of real-world exploitation within the next 30 days, expressed as a value between 0 and 1 (i.e. 0 % to 100 %). A score of 0.42 means „the model estimates a 42 % chance of real-world exploitation within 30 days“.

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    98.0 %
    High — model estimates ≥ 50% chance of real-world exploitation within 30 days.
    EPSS percentile

    The EPSS percentile is the relative position of a vulnerability within all EPSS-scored CVEs, expressed as a value between 0 and 1. A percentile of 0.90 means „this CVE has a higher EPSS score than 90 % of all other scored CVEs“. Unlike the EPSS score, it is not a probability — but a positioning within a ranking.

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    99.91
    Critical — this CVE ranks in the top fifth of all CVEs scored today (rank ≥ 80%).
    KEV status

    The KEV catalogue is a list maintained by the US authority CISA of vulnerabilities for which active exploitation in the wild has been confirmed. It answers not the question „how severe?“ but „is it already being attacked?“ — thereby sharply prioritising patching.

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    Actively exploited
    Published
    In CISA KEV since

    The KEV catalogue is a list maintained by the US authority CISA of vulnerabilities for which active exploitation in the wild has been confirmed. It answers not the question „how severe?“ but „is it already being attacked?“ — thereby sharply prioritising patching.

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    CISA assessment (SSVC)
    Exploitation: active · automatable · Technical impact: total
    Source: CISA Vulnrichment, as of 29 January 2025
    CWE

    CWE is a catalogue of typical weakness types in software and hardware — such as flawed input validation, unsafe memory handling or poor authentication. Where a CVE names a concrete vulnerability in a concrete product, a CWE describes the underlying class of defect.

    Read in glossary
    CWE-78

    Response and mitigation

    Why act now?

    Prioritisation rationale

    The flaw is network-reachable without authentication and yields a root shell on an OT-adjacent device, placing it among the KEV entries with the highest real-world exploitation likelihood. SolarView appliances are frequently exposed directly to the internet for remote PV-plant monitoring and are actively harvested by botnet operators (Mirai derivatives) as cheap infrastructure. For NIS2-regulated energy operators and distributed-generation providers this is a priority-1 patch even without a CISA ransomware flag, because availability loss on a monitoring fleet triggers immediate reporting duties. Rank your exposure by internet reachability × firmware 6.00 presence × absence of internal segmentation.

    1. Runbook step 1

      Immediate response (0-24 h)

      • Inventory all SolarView Compact SV-CPT-MC310 units running firmware 6.00 (asset DB, Shodan sweep of your ASN, internal scans for the SolarView web UI fingerprint). Pull every internet-exposed instance behind a VPN or authenticated reverse proxy immediately.
      • Check for a vendor firmware update from Contec and deploy it — the target version must be read from the current vendor advisory, as CISA does not pin a specific fixed build. If no patch exists for your model, remove the device from production until clarified.
      • Block access to conf_mail.php at the reverse proxy, WAF or upstream firewall. This is the exact injection endpoint and the one hit by mass scanners.
      • Move affected PV monitoring appliances into an isolated OT/IoT VLAN and restrict egress to an allowlist (vendor NTP, designated mail relay only). This breaks the second stage of the known exploit chain, where Mirai-family droppers pull payloads over HTTP or TFTP.
      • Compromise check: look for unknown cron entries, modified binaries under /tmp, and outbound IRC or HTTP C2 traffic. On suspicion, image the device, factory reset, and reinstall with patched firmware before returning it to service.
      • Rotate every web UI and service credential even though the exploit is pre-auth — attackers routinely plant backdoor accounts after initial RCE.

    2. Runbook step 2

      Mitigation layers

      • Network segmentation: dedicated VLAN for SolarView appliances with no route to office or control-room networks. Only one defined monitoring jump host may reach TCP/80 or TCP/443 inbound.
      • Perimeter: generic deny rule on the reverse proxy or firewall for URI paths matching */conf_mail.php* and request bodies containing shell metacharacters (;, |, `, $(, &&) in the mail_address or related mail-configuration parameters.
      • WAF/IPS signature on POST to conf_mail.php with non-RFC5321-compliant characters in the mail field. Snort/Suricata skeleton: content:"POST"; http_method; content:"conf_mail.php"; http_uri; pcre:"/[;|\x60$()&]/P";.
      • Egress filtering: block outbound traffic from the SolarView VLAN to Pastebin-style hosts, raw GitHub, IP-literal URLs, and IRC ports (6660-7000) — standard payload-fetch and C2 channels for the botnet families targeting this CVE.
      • Hardening: expose the admin UI only through an IPsec or WireGuard tunnel, and front it with HTTP basic auth at the reverse proxy until the device is patched.
      • Lifecycle: verify EOL status. If Contec no longer ships patches for your model, document an end-of-service decision (NIS2 evidence requirement) and plan replacement.

    3. Runbook step 3

      Detection rules

      • Web access logs: POST to /conf_mail.php containing shell metacharacters in the body. Sigma shape: selection: cs-method: POST; cs-uri-stem|endswith: '/conf_mail.php'; cs-post-body|contains: ['|','','$(',';wget',';curl']`.
      • Zeek/Suricata: correlate HTTP transactions against SolarView hosts where http.request.body matches (wget|curl|tftp|nc)\s+(http|ftp|\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+).
      • NetFlow: unusual outbound connections from a SolarView device to external IPs on TCP/23, TCP/2323, TCP/6667, or TCP/443 shortly after a POST to conf_mail.php — classic Mirai/Gafgyt behaviour.
      • EDR on the monitoring jump host: process ancestry httpd → sh → wget|curl|busybox is never legitimate here. Alert on Sysmon EID 1 where the parent is httpd or php-cgi and the child executes from /tmp or /var/tmp.
      • Threat-intel correlation: hourly check of SolarView device IPs against known Mirai and SV-CPT scanner IOCs (abuse.ch, GreyNoise tag "SolarView Compact RCE Attempt").

    Detection rules

    No NEOSEC detection rule is available for this vulnerability yet.

    Classification under NIS2 and CRA

    Rule-based classification from exploitation status and severity. It does not replace a case-by-case assessment.

    NIS2

    NIS2 is EU Directive (EU) 2022/2555 to raise the level of cybersecurity across the Union. It substantially broadens obligations compared with the first NIS directive: more sectors, mandatory risk management, staged reporting duties and personal accountability of senior management.

    Read in glossary
    Actively exploited: treat the vulnerability as a priority in vulnerability handling under Art. 21(2)(e) NIS2. If it is exploited in your environment, check the reporting obligation under Art. 23 (early warning within 24 hours).
    CRA

    The CRA is EU Regulation (EU) 2024/2847 setting horizontal cybersecurity requirements for „products with digital elements“ — from industrial controllers and software to connected consumer devices. For the first time manufacturers must ensure security across the entire product lifecycle, handle vulnerabilities and provide security updates.

    Read in glossary
    Since 11.09.2026, manufacturers of affected products with digital elements must report actively exploited vulnerabilities under Art. 14 CRA, with an early warning within 24 hours via ENISA's single reporting platform.
    ISO/IEC 27001

    ISO/IEC 27001 is the internationally leading standard for an information security management system (ISMS). It describes a risk-based, process-oriented framework to systematically plan, implement, review and improve information security.

    Read in glossary
    Control A.8.8, management of technical vulnerabilities: assess relevance to your systems, plan remediation and keep evidence.

    Description

    SolarView Compact ver.6.00 was discovered to contain a command injection vulnerability via conf_mail.php.

    Source: pwn.watch, NVD (NIST), cvelistv5, CISA KEV Catalog, CVE.org (MITRE)

    Vendors and products

    Affected operating systems

    Affected operating systems
    Othercontecsv-cpt-mc310_firmware6.00

    Weakness classes (CWE)

    • CWE-78Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command ('OS Command Injection')

      Base

      The product constructs all or part of an OS command using externally-influenced input from an upstream component, but it does not neutralize or incorrectly neutralizes special elements that could modify the intended OS command when it is sent to a downstream component.

      Entry at MITRE CWE-78

    Public exploit references

    Publicly reported proof-of-concepts, exploit modules and detection templates for this vulnerability. NEOSEC links to the original sources only and does not provide any exploit code.

    Public exploit references
    CISA KEV CatalogCISA Known Exploited Vulnerability (opens in a new tab)cisa.govactively exploited
    Packet StormSolarView Compact 6.0 Command Injection (opens in a new tab)packetstormsecurity.comPoC (publicly reported)reported, not verified—
    PoC-in-GitHub (nomi-sec)solarview-ics-vulnerability-analysis (opens in a new tab)github.comPoC (publicly reported)reported, not verified

    References & sources

    • drive.google.comdrive/folders/1tGr-WExbpfvhRg31XCoaZOFLWyt3r60g?usp=sharingx_refsource_MISC, Exploit, Third-party advisory
    • packetstormsecurity.comfiles/167183/SolarView-Compact-6.0-Command-Injection.htmlx_refsource_MISC, Exploit, Third-party advisory
    • cisa.govknown-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog?field_cve=CVE-2022-29303government-resource, US government resource
    • pwn.watchpwn.watch: SolarView Compact: Command Injection (CVE-2022-29303)pwn-watch
    • jvn.jpVendor advisory: SolarView Compactpwn-watch
    • NVD (NIST)NVD: CVE-2022-29303pwn-watch
    • cisa.govCISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalogpwn-watch
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