Pierluigi Paganini June 22, 2023

Apple rolled out security updates to address actively exploited zero-day flaws in iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and Safari.

Apple addressed a set of vulnerabilities in iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and the Safari browser that were actively exploited in the wild.

The IT giant addressed the zero-day vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2023-32434 and CVE-2023-32435, exploited as part of the recently disclosed Operation Triangulation.

Recently, Kaspersky researchers dug into Operation Triangulation and discovered more details about the exploit chain employed to deliver the spyware to iOS devices. In early June, researchers from the Russian firm Kaspersky uncovered a previously unknown APT group that is targeting iOS devices with zero-click exploits as part of a long-running campaign dubbed Operation Triangulation.

The experts discovered the attack while monitoring the network traffic of their own corporate Wi-Fi network dedicated to mobile devices using the Kaspersky Unified Monitoring and Analysis Platform (KUMA).

According to Kaspersky researchers, Operation Triangulation began at least in 2019 and is still ongoing.

The attack chains commenced with a message sent via the iMessage service to an iOS device. The message has an attachment containing an exploit. The expert explained that the message triggers a remote code execution vulnerability without any user interaction (zero-click).

Below are the description for the two issues addressed by Apple:

• CVE-2023-32434 – An integer overflow that resides in the Kernel, it was addressed with improved input validation.  An app may can trigger the vulnerability to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited against versions of iOS released before iOS 15.7.
• CVE-2023-32435 – A memory corruption vulnerability in WebKit that can be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution when processing specially crafted web content. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited against versions of iOS released before iOS 15.7.

Both issues have been reported by Georgy Kucherin (@kucher1n), Leonid Bezvershenko (@bzvr_), and Boris Larin (@oct0xor) of Kaspersky.

Today Apple released updates for CVE-2023-32434 (Kernel) and CVE-2023-32435 (WebKit) in-the-wild zero-days which were discovered by us (@kucher1n, @bzvr_ and yours truly) in the #iOSTriangulation attacks. Update your iOS/iPadOS/macOS/watchOS now! pic.twitter.com/w1HxJwq4GO

— Boris Larin (@oct0xor) June 21, 2023

Another zero-day fixed by Apple, not exploited as part of Operation Triangulation, is an arbitrary code execution tracked as CVE-2023-32439. The company addressed the vulnerability with improved checks.

“Processing maliciously crafted web content may lead to arbitrary code execution. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited.” reads the advisory published the company.

The list of Apple security updates is available here.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, zero-day)