Apple's Emergency Patch For NSO Hack
Apple has released an emergency software patch to fix a security vulnerability that researchers have said allows hackers to directly infect iPhones and other Apple devices without any user action. Apple was not aware of the attack until researchers found evidence of it on a Saudi activist's phone. The patch is to fix a major vulnerability in iMessage.
Security researchers found the vulnerability when they were investigating the potential hack of a Saudi activist’s iPhone, says Citizen Lab, a digital rights group housed at the University of Toronto's Munk School that has been analysing the Israeli NSO Group spyware.
Malicious image files were transmitted to the activist’s phone via the iMessage instant-messaging app before it was hacked with NSO’s Pegasus spyware, which opens a phone to allow spying and remote data theft. “While analysing the phone of a Saudi activist infected with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, we discovered a zero-day zero-click exploit against iMessage...
The exploit, which we call FORCEDENTRY, targets Apple’s image rendering library, and was effective against Apple iOS, MacOS and WatchOS devices.”
Pegasus is a powerful spyware that is capable of turning on a target’s camera and microphone to record messages, texts, emails, and calls, even if they’re sent via encrypted messaging apps.
“We determined that the mercenary spyware company NSO Group used the vulnerability to remotely exploit and infect the latest Apple devices with the Pegasus spyware. We believe that FORCEDENTRY has been in use since at least February 2021” says Citizen Lab.
Researchers believe the attack was carried out by a customer of NSO, the infamous Israeli company that sells spyware to dozens of governments all over the world.
The hack relied on an unknown vulnerability, also known as a zero-day in iMessage, which allowed the hackers to take over a target’s phone by sending them a message that was effectively invisible. These kinds of attacks are called zero-click exploits, as they don’t require the victim to click on anything. The breach was significant because the flaws exploited the latest iPhone software at the time, both iOS 14.4 and later iOS 14.6, which Apple released in May. But the exploit broke through new iPhone defences that Apple had embedded into iOS 14, named BlastDoor, which were supposed to prevent silent attacks by filtering potentially malicious code.
Zero click remote exploits are used to infect a device without the victim’s knowledge or the need for the victim to click on anything at all and can be used to infect victim devices for as long as six months. They are principally used by governments, mercenaries and criminals who want to secretly monitor targets’ devices undetected.
Citizen Lab: Vice: The Register: Flipboard: Independent: Threatpost: Times Colonist:
Image: Unsplash
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