Pierluigi Paganini
September 21, 2023
Apple released emergency security updates to address three new zero-day vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-41993, CVE-2023-41991, CVE-2023-41992) that have been exploited in attacks in the wild.
The three flaws were discovered by Bill Marczak of The Citizen Lab at The University of Toronto’s Munk School and Maddie Stone of Google’s Threat Analysis Group. The two research teams have already discovered multiple actively exploited zero-days in Apple products that were exploited in targeted attacks against high-profile individuals, such as opposition politicians, dissidents, and journalists.
CVE-2023-41993 is an arbitrary code execution issue that resides in the Webkit.
An attacker can trigger the flaw by tricking the victim into visiting specially crafted web content that may lead to arbitrary code execution. The IT giant addressed the flaw with improved checks.
The second zero-day flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-41991, resides in the Security framework. An attacker can exploit this vulnerability to bypass signature validation using malicious apps. The company fixed the vulnerability by fixing a certificate validation issue.
The third zero-day, tracked as CVE-2023-41992, resides in the Kernel Framework. A local attacker can trigger the flaws to elevate their privileges. Apple fixed the flaw with improved checks.
“Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited against versions of iOS before iOS 16.7.” reads the advisory published by the company.
The company fixed the three zero-day vulnerabilities with the release of macOS 12.7/13.6, iOS 16.7/17.0.1, iPadOS 16.7/17.0.1, and watchOS 9.6.3/10.0.1.
Fixes are available for iPhone XS and later, iPad Pro 12.9-inch 2nd generation and later, iPad Pro 10.5-inch, iPad Pro 11-inch 1st generation and later, iPad Air 3rd generation and later, iPad 6th generation and later, iPad mini 5th generation and later
Apple has already patched 16 actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in 2023, below is the list of the flaws fixed by the company:
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