Pierluigi Paganini February 08, 2019

Security experts at Google discovered that two of the zero-day vulnerabilities patched by Apple with the release of iOS 12.1.4 were exploited in the wild.

Security researchers at Google revealed that two of the zero-day flaws addressed by Apple with the release of iOS 12.1.4 were exploited in the wild.

Apple iOS 12.1.4 version addresses four vulnerabilities, two issues associated with the FaceTime bug and two memory corruption flaws that could be exploited by attackers to elevate privileges and execute arbitrary code.

The CVE-2019-7287 vulnerability affects the IOKit and it can be exploited by a malicious app to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges.

“An application may be able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges.” reads the security advisory.

“A memory corruption issue was addressed with improved input validation.”

The CVE-2019-7286 vulnerability impacts the Foundation component in iOS, it could allow a malicious application to gain elevated privileges.

“An application may be able to gain elevated privileges” continues the advisory. “A memory corruption issue was addressed with improved input validation.”

The flaws were discovered by Clement Lecigne of Google Threat Analysis Group, and Ian Beer and Samuel Groß of Google Project Zero. Apple also credited an anonymous researcher for the discovery of the vulnerabilities.

Project Zero Team Lead Ben Hawkes revealed that both CVE-2019-7286 and CVE-2019-7287 have been exploited in the wild. Google experts did not reveal technical details on the attacks they observed in the wild.

The popular Google Project white hat hacker Tavis Ormandy confirmed that three of the four vulnerabilities addressed by Apple were exploited by attackers in the wild.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, iOS 12.1.4)

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