A dangerous silent AirDrop attack is threatening Apple users

A new evil vulnerability affecting the AirDrop service could be exploited by attackers to silently infect iPhones and Apple Macs.

Versions prior to the latest Apple OS version, the newborn iOS 9, are affected by a serious AirDrop Bug. The AirDrop Bug could be exploited by hackers to take full control of Apple iPhone or Mac machines.

The AirDrop Bug has been disclosed by the Australian security researcher Mark Dowd, AirDrop is a proprietary service that enables the transfer of documents among supported Macintosh computers and iOS devices.

The AirDrop bug allows anyone within the range of an AirDrop user to silently install a malware on the targeted Apple device by sending an AirDrop file which causes rebooting of the target. The vulnerability affects iOS versions supporting the AirDrop from iOS 7 onwards, as well as Mac OS X versions from Yosemite onwards.

The principal problem for Apple users is that an attacker can exploit the AirDrop bug even if the victim rejects the incoming file sent over AirDrop.

After rebooting the device, the malware gains access to Springboard, the Apple’s software to manage iOS home screen, allowing the malicious app to masquerade the rights granted to the bogus application.

These rights include access to:

Contacts
Camera
Location
Messages
and many more…

It is clear that by having access to the above features of the phone, the attacker can fully compromise the victim’s device.

Below a video PoC of the AirDrop bug exploitation published by Dowd, the video shows an attack on an iPhone running iOS 8.4.1.

The AirDrop bug has been fixed in the last iOS 9 that comes with a sandbox mechanism implemented by Apple that block attackers for writing files to arbitrary locations on the device via AirDrop service.

Waiting for a complete patch to fix the issue, Apple users urge to Update to iOS 9 and Mac OS X EI Capitan, which are in imminent outgoing.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Hacking, Apple Airdrop bug)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.