- Apple security update closes spyware iphones software#
- Apple security update closes spyware iphones code#
Known as a “zero click remote exploit,” it is considered the Holy Grail of surveillance because it allows governments, mercenaries and criminals to secretly break into a victim’s device without tipping the victim off. The spyware, called Pegasus, used a novel method to invisibly infect an Apple device without the victim’s knowledge for as long as six months.
Apple security update closes spyware iphones software#
“Put it all together, this is unprecedented.”Īpple said in a statement that it fixed the vulnerability immediately after learning about it.Apple issued emergency software updates for a critical vulnerability in its products on Monday after security researchers uncovered a flaw that allows highly invasive spyware from Israel’s NSO Group to infect anyone’s iPhone, Apple Watch or Mac computer without so much as a click.Īpple’s security team has been working around the clock to develop a fix since Tuesday, after researchers at Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog organization at the University of Toronto, discovered that a Saudi activist’s iPhone had been infected with spyware from NSO Group. They created spyware with the most comprehensive feature set you can have, and they deployed it in a way that no one would catch it for years. “They picked the iPhone, the hardest platform to compromise. “I cannot remember a single malware attack that contained three distinct zero-day exploits,” he says. While nation states targeting individuals is nothing new, this attack was something no one has ever seen before, says Lookout’s Murray. “The high cost of iPhone zero-days, the apparent use of NSO Group’s government-exclusive Pegasus product, and prior known targeting of Mansoor by the UAE government provide indicators that point to the UAE government as the likely operator behind the targeting,” Citizen Labs’ report concludes. In addition, the material Stealth Falcon used as bait to lure victims into clicking the fatal link “was overwhelmingly geared towards the UAE”, he says.
Stealth Falcon, in turn, had targeted other UAE dissidents in the past who were later imprisoned or convicted in absentia, Marczak adds. “So the link we suspect between Stealth Falcon and NSO is that Stealth Falcon is an NSO customer,” says Bill Marczak, senior researcher for Citizen Lab. The hacking group shared a handful of Internet servers with NSO. The company said it had no knowledge of any particular incidents.Ĭitizen Lab also uncovered links between NSO and a group known to have launched attacks on other UAE citizens known as Stealth Falcon. In a statement that stopped short of acknowledging that the spyware was its own, the NSO Group said its mission was to provide “authorized governments with technology that helps them combat terror and crime”. That organization sells surveillance software called Pegasus to nation states in 2012, NSO sold 300 licenses to the government of Panama for $8m.
Apple security update closes spyware iphones code#
“You can load any software you want.”įrom that point, it would have been possible for attackers to spy on virtually anything Mansour did – phone calls, text messages, Gmail, Skype, and Facebook – as well as scan his calendar, and steal passwords and other personal information.īy tracking the domains used to launch the attack, as well as code embedded inside those sites, Citizen Lab traced it to a private Israeli security firm called NSO Group. “Once you become the kernel, at that point you are the phone,” Murray says. The third exploit replaced the kernel, becoming a part of iOS.
The second located the core of the phone’s operating system, known as the kernel. The first attack exploited a vulnerability in the Safari, fooling the phone into launching a browser session. When researchers found that the attack had used three separate “zero-day exploits” – attacks never before encountered by security researchers – they decided to name the attack “Trident”, says Mike Murray, vice-president for security research and response at Lookout. What they found was an extremely sophisticated piece of spyware that, when launched, would jailbreak Mansour’s iPhone and take complete control of the operating system, bypassing any security controls Apple put in place.ĭetailed reports issued by Lookout and Citizen Lab outlined how the technique worked, potentially compromising an iPhone with the tap of a finger – a trick so coveted in the world of cyberespionage that in November one spyware broker claimed it had paid a $1m dollar bounty to programmers who’d found a way to do it.
0 kommentar(er)
