Security News
The Mail application in iOS is affected by two critical zero-day vulnerabilities that appear to have been exploited in targeted attacks since at least January 2018, cybersecurity automation company ZecOps reported on Wednesday. The vulnerabilities, described as out-of-bounds write and heap overflow issues, affect the MobileMail application on iOS 12 and maild on iOS 13, and they can be exploited by sending specially crafted emails to the targeted user.
Apple has reportedly patched a pair of critical vulnerabilities in iOS that are being exploited by what appears to be government-backed hackers to spy on high-value targets. Most importantly, the researchers said, in iOS 13, the attack can be performed when Mail automatically downloads messages in the background, meaning no user interaction is needed: the data is fetched, parsed, and the bugs exploited immediately.
Researchers are reporting two Apple iOS zero-day security vulnerabilities affecting its Mail app on iPhones and iPads. Impacted are iOS 6 and iOS 13.4.1.
Zoom has removed a feature in its iOS web conferencing app that was sharing analytics data with Facebook, after a report revealing the practice sparked outrage. In a Friday post, Zoom that it has now removed the "Login with Facebook" software development kit for iOS, which was the feature tied to the data sharing: "Our customers' privacy is incredibly important to us, and therefore we decided to remove the Facebook SDK in our iOS client, and have reconfigured the feature so that users will still be able to log in with Facebook via their browser," according to Eric Yuan, founder of Zoom.
Publicised by ProtonVPN, the issue is a bypass flaw caused by iOS not closing existing connections as it establishes a VPN tunnel, affecting iOS 13.3.1 as well as the latest version. A VPN app should open a private connection to a dedicated server through which all internet traffic from the device is routed before being forwarded to the website or service someone is accessing.
Researchers said the Apple VPN bypass bug in iOS fails to terminate all existing connections and leaves a limited amount of data unprotected, such as a device's IP address, exposing it for a limited window of time. "Most connections are short-lived and will eventually be re-established through the VPN tunnel on their own. However, some are long-lasting and can remain open for minutes to hours outside the VPN tunnel," researchers explained in a technical analysis of the flaw.
Proton Technologies, the company behind the privacy-focused ProtonMail and ProtonVPN services, this week disclosed the existence of a vulnerability in Apple's iOS mobile operating system that prevents VPN applications from encrypting all traffic. When a VPN is used, the device's operating system should close all existing internet connections and reestablish them through a VPN tunnel to protect the user's data and privacy.
A recently observed campaign is attempting to infect the iPhones of users in Hong Kong with an iOS backdoor that allows attackers to take over devices, Trend Micro reports. The attack involved the use of malicious links posted on forums popular in Hong Kong, which led users to real news sites where a hidden iframe would load and run malware.
Apple has just announced its latest something for everyone security and feature updates for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. In terms of security, the attention grabber is iOS/iPad 13.4, which fixes 30 CVEs. As usual, WebKit browser engine and Safari gave Apple plenty to fix, all but one of which were found by sources outside the company, including an arbitrary code execution flaw, CVE-2020-3899, credited to Google's open source fuzzing tool, OSS-Fuzz.
Apple has released a slew of patches across its iOS and macOS operating systems, Safari browser, watchOS, tvOS and iTunes. Of the CVEs disclosed, 30 affected Apple's iOS, 11 impacted Safari and 27 affected macOS. Users for their part are urged to update to iOS 13.4, Safari 13.1 and macOS Catalina 10.15.3.