Security Week 05: sudo, iOS vulnerability and attack on researchers

The past week has been eventful. Let’s start with three vulnerabilities in Apple’s mobile operating systems that were allegedly exploited in real-world attacks. IN brief According to Apple, two vulnerabilities are attributed to the WebKit engine – they allow the execution of arbitrary code. Another hole in the core of iOS and iPadOS allows for privilege escalation.

All three vulnerabilities are closed in OS update 14.4 from January 26th. Apple reports that it is aware of the active exploitation of these three bugs. The details of this attack are unknown, but there is a recent example of zero-click exploitation in iOS 13. disclosed in a Citizen Lab report at the end of December last year.

On Thursday 28 January, Google Project Zero Team Specialist Samuel Gross published description of another security mechanism implemented in iOS 14. With the help of reverse engineering, the expert analyzes the structural change in the operation of the built-in messenger iMessage. Apparently, the current version of Apple’s mobile OS has implemented strict isolation of all input processing tools. This should make it harder to create new attack methods, even using as-yet-unknown vulnerabilities. On the one hand, Apple is not limited to the treatment of individual bugs, on the other hand, even with new protection mechanisms, attacks on devices with the subsequent installation of a backdoor are quite possible. Either way, it’s worth updating your iPhone or iPad to the latest OS.

A vulnerability in the sudo utility, a universal tool for temporary elevation of user rights, was discovered by experts from Qualys (original article, news, discussion on Habré). Using the sudoedit command can cause a buffer overflow with subsequent elevation of user rights on the system. The vulnerability got into the utility code in 2011, and sudo versions 1.8.2-1.8.31p2 and 1.9.0-1.9.5p1 are affected. Patches for popular Linux distributions were released on January 26th.

Finally, last week it became known about an attack on the information security experts themselves. Review article appeared in Vice, technical details in Google publications Threat Analysis Group and Microsoft… At the end of last year, several Twitter accounts (examples are in the screenshot above) actively communicated with security specialists, offering to participate in the analysis of an exploit for a vulnerability in Windows Defender. Those who entered into correspondence were sent a project for the Visual Studio IDE with a malicious appendage.

Most likely, this was a fallback method of attack, and the main method was a pseudo-blog, where an exploit for a vulnerability in the Chrome browser was posted. For which one is unknown, but links to the blog were actively distributed on Twitter and on other sites, for example, on Reddit. The virtual personalities had full bios, LinkedIn profiles, and GitHub accounts. On Twitter, there is some evidence of a successful attack, although often it was only the virtual machine that was specially raised to open such links that “suffered”. However, this story suggests that social engineering works for professionals too.

What else happened:

Europol intercepted control over the Emotet botnet.

Detailed description attacks on the head multimedia device in a Nissan car.

Firefox Developers rolled out version 85, where we implemented protection against the so-called “supercookies“This method of tracking the user is now made as difficult as possible by caching the data separately for each website visited.”

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