Google Project Zero security researchers have discovered one of the largest attacks on iPhone users, which used websites that distribute malicious software. The report says that the websites injected malware onto the devices of all visitors, the number of which was several thousand every week.
“There was no target orientation. Simply visiting a malicious site is enough for the exploit server to attack your device, and if it is successful, monitoring tools will be installed. According to our estimates, these sites are visited by thousands of users every week, ”wrote Ian Beer, a specialist at Google Project Zero, in a blog post.
The report says that some of the attacks used so-called zero-day exploits. This means that a vulnerability was exploited that Apple developers do not know about, so they had “zero days” to fix it.
Ian Beer also wrote that the Google Threat Intelligence Group was able to identify five distinct iPhone exploit chains based on 14 vulnerabilities. The detected chains were used to hack devices running software platforms from iOS 10 to iOS 12. Google specialists notified Apple of their discovery and in February of this year, the vulnerabilities were fixed.
The researcher said that after a successful attack on a user device, malware was distributed, which was mainly used to steal information and record data about the location of the device in real time. “The tracking tool requested commands from the command and control server every 60 seconds,” said Jan Beer.
He also noted that the malware had access to stored user passwords and databases of various messaging applications, including Telegram, WhatsApp and iMessage. End-to-end encryption used in such applications can protect messages from interception, but the level of protection is significantly reduced if attackers manage to compromise the end device.
“Given the volume of stolen information, attackers can maintain constant access to different accounts and services using stolen authentication tokens even after losing access to the user device,” Jan Beer warns iPhone users.
Source: 3dnews.ru