Apple fixes two flaws used to attack Kaspersky employees

Friday, 23 June 2023 10:06

Apple fixes two flaws used to attack Kaspersky employees Featured

By Sam Varghese

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

Apple has issued fixes for two flaws in its iOS and iPadOS operating systems that were used to attack employees of Russian cyber security firm Kaspersky.

In a brief security advisory, the company said on Wednesday the vulnerability would allow an app to run arbitrary code with kernel privileges.

It credited Georgy Kucherin, Leonid Bezvershenko and Boris Larin of Kaspersky for finding the bug.

When the Kaspersky employees disclosed the bug earlier this month, they said the company had been under attack since 2019 with iMessage being the app that had served as an entry point. The campaign was dubbed Operation Triangulation.

Kaspersky founder Eugene Kaspersky said at the time the attack used an invisible iMessage with a malicious attachment. A number of vulnerabilities in iOS were used to install malware.

"The deployment of the spyware is completely hidden and requires no action from the user," he wrote.

"Further, the spyware also quietly transmits private information to remote servers: microphone recordings, photos from instant messengers, geolocation and data about a number of other activities of the owner of the infected device."

At the same time, the Russian security agency FSB said it had discovered that these attacks were being carried out by the NSA, in cahoots with Apple. Neither the NSA nor Apple made any public statement about the claims.

"It was found that several thousand telephone sets of this brand were infected," FSB said in a statement [Google translation thanks to Ars Technica].

Kaspersky [the firm] has been on the NSA's radar ever since it exposed hacks of various entities by Western agencies. It began with the Russian firm exposing the UK's GCHQ in 2014, which tried to hack a Belgian telecommunications provider.

In 2015, Kaspersky exposed an entity it called the Equation Group, which has been long rumoured to be an internal NSA unit. The company also detailed how the Stuxnet operation was carried out to cripple Iran's nuclear reactors.

Stuxnet was discovered by Sergey Ulasen in 2010; he joined Kaspersky a year later. The virus was infiltrated into Iran's nuclear labs through an USB drive as the lab was not connected to any external network.

Israeli Government hackers breached the Kaspersky network in 2014; after the company found out in 2015, it wrote a detailed analysis of the incident.

In addition to the two flaws reported by the Kaspersky researchers, Apple also issued a number of fixes for vulnerabilities in its macOS and watchOS operating systems.

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