Her researchers Google unveiled a malicious campaign targeting the iPhone for at least two years. According to the researchers, this campaign has stopped, although they warn that there may be other ways that they have not yet identified.
The security team Project Zero, announced that it had discovered some malicious websites that could be used for it infringement of Apple devices, individually using five different exploits.
The exploits used 14 different vulnerabilities that covered every release from iOS 10 to iOS 12. Apple released an update to iOS 12.1.4 in February after Project Zero researchers revealed the vulnerabilities and gave the company a week to fix them.
The Project Zero team usually follows one strict disclosure period of 90 days, but in this case it only gave a week because of the severity of the vulnerabilities.
Google Project Zero team researcher Ian Beer reported:
A simple visit to the site was enough for an attack on your device and if the attack was successful, the device would get a malicious tracking application. We estimate that these sites had thousands of visitors a week.
The 14 vulnerabilities were present in Safari and the kernel, except for two separate cases of sandbox escapes where maliciouss code could run outside the boundaries of an application.
In short, the 5 exploits gave elevated “root” privileges to the attacker with full rights to install malicious preletterand access device files sent every 60 seconds by a command and control server.
But it is more worryingly, the malware also uploaded the devices' keychain, which is used to securely store data, (eg passwords, Wi-Fi codes, and certificates) from well-known applications such as: WhatsApp, Telegram, Skype, Facebook, Viber, Gmail and Outlook.
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