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Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category

Apple released a security update for OS X Java on Tuesday, plugging a security vulnerability exploited by the latest Flashback Trojan. The latest variant of the Mac-specific malware appeared on Monday and targeted a vulnerability in Java (CVE-2012-0507) which was patched on Windows machines more than six weeks ago.

Apple’s new version of Java for OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and 10.7 (Lion) offers Mac users equivalent protection.

Doctor Web, a Russian anti-virus vendor, conducted a research to determine the scale of spreading of Flashback Trojan in Mac OS X. Now BackDoor.Flashback botnet encompasses more than 550 000 infected machines, most of which are located in the United States and Canada. This once again refutes claims by some experts that there are no cyber-threats to Mac OS X.

Systems get infected with BackDoor.Flashback.39 after a user is redirected to a bogus site from a compromised resource or via a traffic distribution system. JavaScript code is used to load a Java-applet containing an exploit. Doctor Web’s virus analysts discovered a large number of web-sites containing the code. The recently discovered ones include:

godofwar3.rr.nu
ironmanvideo.rr.nu
killaoftime.rr.nu
gangstasparadise.rr.nu
mystreamvideo.rr.nu
bestustreamtv.rr.nu
ustreambesttv.rr.nu
ustreamtvonline.rr.nu
ustream-tv.rr.nu
ustream.rr.nu

According to some sources, links to more than four million compromised web-pages could be found on a Google SERP at the end of March. In addition, some posts on Apple user forums described cases of infection by BackDoor.Flashback.39 when visiting dlink.com.

Attackers began to exploit CVE-2011-3544 and CVE-2008-5353 vulnerabilities to spread malware in February 2012, and after March 16 they switched to another exploit (CVE-2012-0507). The vulnerability has been closed by Apple only on April 3 2012.

The exploit saves an executable file onto the hard drive of the infected Mac machine. The file is used to download malicious payload from a remote server and to launch it. Doctor Web found two versions of the Trojan horse: attackers started using a modified version of BackDoor.Flashback.39 around April 1. Similarly to the older versions, the launched malware first searches the hard drive for the following components:

/Library/Little Snitch
/Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode
/Applications/VirusBarrier X6.app
/Applications/iAntiVirus/iAntiVirus.app
/Applications/avast!.app
/Applications/ClamXav.app
/Applications/HTTPScoop.app
/Applications/Packet Peeper.app

If the files are not found, the Trojan uses a special routine to generate a list of control servers, sends an installation success notification to intruders’ statistics server and sends consecutive queries at control server addresses.

It should be noted that the malware utilizes a very peculiar routine for generating such addresses. It can also switch between several servers for better load balancing. After receiving a reply from a control server, BackDoor.Flashback.39 verifies its RSA signature and then, if successful, downloads and runs payload on the infected machine. It may get and run any executable specified in a directive received from a server.

Each bot includes a unique ID of the infected machine into the query string it sends to a control server. Doctor Web’s analysts employed the sinkhole technology to redirect the botnet traffic to their own servers and thus were able to count infected hosts.

Over 550 000 infected machines running Mac OS X have been a part of the botnet on April 4. These only comprise a segment of the botnet set up by means of the particular BackDoor.Flashback modification. Most infected computers reside in the United States (56.6%, or 303,449 infected hosts), Canada comes second (19.8%, or 106,379 infected computers), the third place is taken by the United Kingdom (12.8% or 68,577 cases of infection) and Australia with 6.1% (32,527 infected hosts) is the fourth.

In related news, Mozilla introduced changes in Firefox on Monday that will block older versions of Java that harbour critical vulnerabilities, specifically the increasingly infamous CVE-2012-0507 security flaw. “Blocklisting” forbids outdated plugins from running, unless specific approval is given. Mozilla has only introduced the technology into Windows versions of its open-source browser software, leaving Mac users without the added safety net.

Java is not needed to surf the net, with the exception of applications on some e-banking websites. Security firms – including F-secure, Sophos and others – have begun advising users to disable the technology in their browsers as a largely unnecessary security risk.

Credit: The Register
Credit: news.drweb.com

Apple is leaving some of its older mobile devices unprotected with its latest patch batch. An iOS 4.3 update, which includes a number of critical security fixes, is incompatible with the still widely used iPhone 3G and older versions of the iPod Touch. The latest version of Apple’s mobile software can only be applied on the iPhone 3GSs and later models; the iPod Touch 3rd generation and later models; as well as all versions of the iPad.

Security fixes bundled with the release include protection against the risk posed by maliciously-crafted TIFF image files and security fixes against multiple memory corruption issues in WebKit, the engine behind the Safari browser.

Security firm Sophos warns that the omission of the fixes leaves users of older iPhone and IPod Touches at heightened risk of drive-by download attacks from booby-trapped websites. The latest version of the OS includes tethering functionality and the ability to stream music between devices across home wireless networks, among other functionality improvements.

“There might be a hardware reason why the latest version of the software can’t be run on older devices,” a Sophos spokesman explained. “Even so, Apple could still release an update for Safari for older devices, the most problematic omission. “Apple should still produce patches, otherwise security conscious people would have to upgrade.”

The handful of malware strains to have infected iPhone devices thus far have only infected jailbroken devices. Although it hasn’t yet happened, mobile malware spreading via browser vulnerabilities is a potential threat, Sophos argues.

In related news, Apple also released a new version of its Safari browser for desktops on Wednesday. Safari version 5.0.4 covers a total of 62 security vulnerabilities. Both Windows and Mac users need to update their software.

The vast majority (57 of the 62, by Sophos’s count) of the security bugs tackled by the update lend themselves to exploitation simply by tricking a surfer who is running vulnerable versions of the software into visiting a maliciously constructed website, a favourite hacker trick.

Credit: The Register

German security researchers have demonstrated that passwords stored on a stolen or lost iPhone can be retrieved in around six minutes even if the device is locked.

Researchers Jens Heider and Matthias Boll from the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT) have published a paper and a video demonstration of their findings.

In order to get access to the phone and unlock access to the file system., the hackers used publicly available jailbreaking tools. They then uploaded a specially designed script able to scrape passwords stored in the device’s keychain. Their decryption was done using OS functions.

The extracted passwords corresponded to website accounts from Safari, Yahoo! Mail, Google Mail, WiFi, voicemail, MS Exchange, IMAP, LDAP, VPN and other services.

The purpose of the research was to demonstrate that stolen or lost iPhones can pose security risks not only to data stored on the devices itself, but also on external services. Furthermore, the iOS device encryption feature gives users a false sense of security, because in reality this protection mechanism can be easily bypassed.

“Owner’s of a lost or stolen iOS device should therefore instantly initiate a change of all stored passwords,” the researchers advise. “Additionally, this should be also done for accounts not stored on the device but which might have equal or similar passwords, as an attacker might try out revealed passwords against the full list of known accounts,” they add.

As far as companies are concerned, when loosing an iOS device they should consider immediately revoking VPN and wireless passwords. The remote wipe functionality might also be used.

The two researchers judge their attack’s complexity as low, because they used tools freely available on the Internet and creating the script only required moderate programming skills.

Credit: Softpedia.com News

A recently disclosed method which allows people to pirate paid apps from the Mac App Store has security researchers worried about the prospect of using it to distribute malware.

The new Mac App Store was launched yesterday at the same time as Mac OS X 10.6.6. It allows people to download and buy desktop applications that passed through Apple’s strict vetting process.
The company hopes that this model will prove as successful for the Mac as it did for iPhones and iPads, however, it seems that it already started on the wrong foot. In virtually hours after the Mac App Store opened to users, someone figured out a way to run paid applications without paying.

If users attempt to install and run an app bought on another computer, they are normally prompted to sign in with the Apple ID and password used to buy it. This is the result of a protection mechanism called “Receipt Checking.” But apparently, all that’s required to bypass this check is copying some files and folders from a valid downloaded app to the one “borrowed” from someone else.

To do this, the .dmg installer of the paid app is needed, and this is where researchers believe the risk lies if the method becomes a common practice. The dmg can be obtained when the app is purchased or from other uncontrolled sources like file sharing websites.

“No doubt some Mac users, also too thrifty to pay, will succumb to the temptation of Googling to acquire these cool apps/games/utilities at no cost,” says Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisor at Sophos.

“Unfortunately, [...] some applications downloaded from the App Store can easily be modified to include any sort of executable code you wish. “It wouldn’t surprise me to see a surge in markets for pirated applications that might just be booby-trapped to include unexpected surprises,” he warns.

Credit: Softpedia.com News

A hack attack that can expose users to malware exploits has infected more than 1 million webpages, at least two of which belong to Apple.

The SQL injection attacks bombard the websites of legitimate companies with database commands that attempt to add hidden links that lead to malware exploits. While most of the sites that fell prey appear to belong to mom-and-pop operations, two of the infections hit pages Apple uses to promote iTunes podcasts. The malicious links appear to have been removed since Google last indexed the pages in early August.
In all, at least 538,000 pages have been compromised by the same attack. Attacks the bear similar fingerprints but point to different domains have claimed close to 500,000 more.

“These attacks have been ongoing and are changing pretty often,” said Mary Landesman, a senior researcher with ScanSafe, a Cisco-owned service that provides customers with real-time intelligence about malicious sites. “Interestingly, many of the sites compromised have been involved in repeated compromises over the past few months. It’s not clear whether these are the work of the same attackers or are competing attacks.”

SQL injection attacks succeed because web applications don’t properly filter search queries and other user-supplied input for malicious text. When the data is processed, commands are passed to a website’s backend server, causing it to add links or cough up sensitive information.

The attacks that hit Apple used highly encoded text strings to sneak past web-application filters. They are only the latest in a series of hack attacks to hit large numbers of websites.

The exploits used this time around weren’t as effective as they might have been. According to Landesman, many of the iframes buried into the websites contained HTML that couldn’t be rendered.

Credit: The Register

AT&T has exposed the email addresses of more than 114,000 early adopters of Apple’s iPad, a security breach that could make some of the world’s most elite celebrities and executives vulnerable to phishing attacks, Gawker reports.

According to an article published Wednesday, the vulnerability in AT&T’s website was exploited by Goatse Security, the same grey-hat group that exposed Firefox-based attacks on IRC, wreaked havoc on Amazon sales rankings, and pioneered some of the most foul images found on the internet. As a result, email addresses for New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson, ABC Newswoman Diane Sawyer, film mogul Harvey Weinstein, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg have been exposed.

The breach also exposed the ICC-ID, or integrated circuit card identifier, for the group of 114,067, which were all early adopters of the iPad 3G. It appears the information is of little use to attackers, but Gawker said the possibility exists for it to be used to spoof individual iPads on AT&T’s network.

According to the report, Goatse obtained the data by exploiting a vulnerable web application on AT&T’s site that matched ICC-IDs with email addresses. By writing a script that bombarded the site with thousands of possible ICC-ID numbers, the group was able to obtain the email addresses. To make their exploit work, members had to lace their requests with an iPad-style user agent header.

Gawker said reporters alerted AT&T to the breach on Monday, and the hole was closed. Shortly after the article was published, the carrier acknowledged the breach, and said it would alert customers after an investigation is completed. So far, Apple has yet to comment on the report.

Other iPad users who were affected included executives at Dow Jones, Conde Nast, Viacom, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and AOL. Top people inside some of the nation’s most sensitive organizations were also exposed, including William Eldredge, who commands the largest strategic bomber group in the US Air Force, Gawker said. It’s possible other groups exploited the same vulnerable web app to make off with a much larger cache of email addresses, Goatse said.

Credit: The Register

A spyware application that surreptitiously scans chat logs and hard drives of unsuspecting Mac users has found its way onto three of the more popular download sites, security researchers said Tuesday.

Dubbed OSX/OpinionSpy, the spyware is distributed through software available on sites including Softpedia, MacUpdate, and VersionTracker, according to Intego, a provider of anti-virus software for Macs. The app isn’t contained in the downloads themselves, but rather gets downloaded during the installation process, Intego said. A Windows version of the program has existed since at least 2008.

Once installed, OpinionSpy scans files and folders on all attached hard drives and regularly sends data in encrypted form to several servers, according to Intego. It also injects code into the Safari, Firefox, and iChat applications and mines them for email addresses, message headers, and other data. The program remains active even if the screensaver or other application that was originally downloaded is uninstalled.

“The fact that this application collects data in this manner, and that it opens a backdoor, makes it a very serious security threat,” Intego researchers wrote. “In addition, the risk of it collecting sensitive data such as user names, passwords and credit card numbers, makes this a very high-risk spyware.”

Apple’s OS X operating system has long been regarded as a haven from the huge base of malware that regularly targets users of Microsoft’s Windows. The Windows threat has grown so large that Google has begun advising its new employees to use alternates, The Financial Times has reported.

Mac’s most ardent supporters have long claimed the platform is more inherently secure than Windows, a perception Apple marketers have been happy to perpetuate. But a more plausible explanation, advanced by Charlie Miller and other white-hat hackers who regularly exploit Apple security bugs, is that the platform isn’t sufficiently big enough to justify the investment of hardened crime gangs.

Intego identified the apps installing OpinionSpy as the MishInc FLV To Mp3 media converter and screensavers made by the company 7art-screensavers.

Credit: The Register

An application that offers to unlock iPhones is actually designed to hijack internet connections on compromised Windows PCs, security watchers warn.

Spam messages direct potential victims to a domain called iphone-iphone.info that offers links to download a Windows executable called blackra1n.exe. The application claims to offer an unlock utility but instead it changes default DNS settings on infected Windows PCs, hijacking internet connections in the process.

Romanian anti-virus firm BitDefender, which identifies the executable as Trojan-BAT-AACL, explains that the malware comes as a Windows batch file packed alongside the iPhone jailbreaking application.

“The Trojan attempts to change the preferred DNS server address for several possible Internet connections on the users’ computers to 188.210.[REMOVED],” BitDefender explains. “This allows the malware creators to intercept the victims’ calls to reach internet sites and to redirect them to their own malware-laden versions of those sites.”

DNS-contaminating malware has been used in the past to redirect users to counterfeit versions of online banking sites. The precise purpose of the malware in this case seems to be to infect compromised Windows PCs with yet more crud, earning hackers affiliate revenues in the process. The Trojan affects only the host Windows PC, not any connected iPhone.

Credit: The Register

Apple’s iPhone is vulnerable to exploits that allow an attacker to spoof web pages even when they’re protected by the SSL, or secure sockets layer, protocol, a security researcher said.

The fault lies in a feature that makes it easy to configure large numbers of iPhones so they meet an organization’s IT policies, said Charlie Miller, a researcher at Independent Security Evaluators. Not only does the provisioning feature work over the internet, it can be tricked into accepting malicious configuration files.

“If the user accepts, the attacker can make changes to the phone’s configuration which can cause harm,” Miller explained.

The revelation comes after the hack was discussed in an anonymous blog post over the weekend. It explained how it was possible to sign an XML-based configuration file using a SSL certificate registered to a fictitious company called Apple Computer. Because the iPhone checks only that the certificate was signed by a trusted CA, or certificate authority, the author’s rogue update.mobilconfig file was accepted and executed.

The author claimed the hack could be used to change an iPhone’s proxy settings, a change that would allow attackers to do much more nefarious deeds such as funnel traffic to servers under their control. Miller said he wasn’t sure such an attack was possible, but he didn’t rule it out, either.

“It definitely allows them to change the trusted certs which means that you can’t trust SSL anymore,” Miller wrote. “I don’t have the cert the guy generated to really confirm things on my own. I’m very confident that it can do a lot though.”

In addition to changing trusted certificates, Miller said, a rogue configuration file could be used to disable Safari or other iPhone apps or block access to particular websites that can be accessed.

For an exploit to work, an attacker would have to apply a fair amount of social engineering. First, a user would have to be tricked into clicking on an email attachment or visiting a website hosting the configuration file. The user would then be presented with a window saying the update has been “verified” and would have to click OK to install it.

The most serious consequence Miller could confirm was the ability to spoof SSL-protected pages, but given the difficulty of the attack, he wasn’t sure how useful that would be.

“If you can get someone to install this thing AND go to your phishing site, the guy probably would have fallen for it without SSL,” he said.

Credit: The Register

A rare emergency update from Microsoft to patch a critical vulnerability in Internet Explorer will be released on Thursday. Critical patches for Adobe Systems software keep coming. This time, they fix serious security bugs in the company’s Shockwave Player. Apple has also released a major security update designed to fix security bugs, some of which present a critical security risk on unpatched systems.

Microsoft update will mark only the 10th 12th time Microsoft has issued a security update outside of its normal schedule since 2003, when it began issuing patches on the second Tuesday of each month. It will come a week after the world learned an attack exploiting the potent IE flaw was used to pierce the defenses of Google and at least some of the other 33 large companies that suffered similar assaults.

Microsoft researchers said that they continue to see only limited attacks that exploit the bug and that, so far, they have only succeed against IE 6. But, as reported Tuesday, researchers elsewhere said they have figured out how to bypass security measures offered in later versions of the widely used browser, making it theoretically possible to compromise a much broader base of PCs.

Microsoft said the emergency patch will be issued as close to 10 am Seattle time as possible and will contain fixes for several other vulnerabilities as well. The company recommends users install it as soon as possible. The patch will require users to restart their machines.

For the first time, Microsoft said the vulnerability could also be exploited to attack users of its email and office productivity software. Thursday’s patch will close holes in those programs as well. Users of Microsoft Access, Word, Excel, or PowerPoint can workaround the issue by disabling ActiveX Controls.

Adobe is strongly urging users to upgrade. Unlike the vast majority of patches, the Shockwave fix requires users manually uninstall the out-of-date version, reboot their systems, and then install the latest version. For an application with more than 450 million installations, that’s downright primitive.

More importantly, making it inconvenient for users to upgrade is a guarantee that a sizable portion of them will remain vulnerable. Adobe has recently unveiled an automatic updater for its Reader application. It’s about time the software maker made seamless updating for Flash and Shockwave standard too. The critical patch, assuming it’s installed, will update Shockwave to version 11.5.6.606.

Patches released by Apple on Tuesday address a malware injection risk in the CoreAudio media player, Flash Player plug-in bugs and a similarly critical vulnerability involving Image Raw. The update also tackles a recently discovered OpenSSL renegotiation exploit. Security fixes for CUPS and Image IO make up the remainder of the patch batch.

Most of these updates are connected with third party software. For example, seven of the twelve CVEs are connected with the update for Adobe’s flash player plug-in. The remainder of the bugs are the usual file format parsing problems that we’ve seen a lot of in the past.

Apple advisory can be found at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4004.

Credit: The Register