STE WILLIAMS

Hackers can access iPhones running iOS 6.x without passcodes, and will then be able to access and export the address book, send emails and make phone calls.

Jailbreak Nation has discovered the method for doing so and The Reg can confirm the method works after a sequence of swipes and key presses. It worked for us on an iPhone 5 running iOS 6.02, not just iOS 6.1 as Jailbreak Nation suggests.

Once the phone has been hacked in the method described in the video below, we were able to access an iPhone 5’s address book, view all details of the contacts listed therein and make calls to them. The Contacts app offers the chance to “Message” contacts by SMS or email and a chance to “Share Contact”, which results in a contact’s details being added to an outgoing email as a .VCF file.

This method could therefore be used to acquire a copy of all contacts stored on an iPhone, and to run up a colossal phone bill on the device.

In our test the iPhone’s Home button became inert after the hacking procedure was applied, making it impossible to access other apps, so Apple will be spared the blushes that would have come with hackers finding stray iPhones and resetting progress in Angry Birds.

With iOS 6.1 proving to be a buggy mess, news of this latest hole won’t make for a happy Friday down Cupertino way. Or weekend, if Mr Cook of Cupertino decides a patch has to be delivered ASAP. ®

Watch Video

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/15/iphone_hack_allows_access_to_contacts_and_phone/

Mobile spammers have released a DIY phone number harvesting tool, but instead of advertising it solely on criminals-only online hangouts, they’re trying to flog it out in the open.

The availability of the utility turns the simple act of submitting a mobile number to a website something that might lead to the receipt of more SMS (text message) spam.

A new version of the phone number harvesting tool crawls the web and indexes mobile numbers, phone ID numbers, the names of the owner, and the associated mobile operator – among other information. Users of the tool can choose which country they want to target.

The harvested information is later used for various malicious and fraudulent purposes.

Key features of the tool include automatic recognition of Russian and Ukrainian mobile phone providers (based on its initial target market), indexing based on a region and city for both Russia and Ukraine, multi-threaded software allowing up to 100 “indexing streams”, as well as an option to collect only numbers attached to a particular mobile provider.

“Cybercriminals and spammers are not strangers to the concept of market segmentation,” explained Dancho Danchev, a security researcher at Webroot, in a blog post.

“Just like true marketers, the developer of the tool has included the option to choose a specific region within the available countries, with the idea to assist in the inevitable malicious and fraudulent activity that will result from this phone number harvesting activity.”

Danchev advises surfers to double-check whether any website that requests your phone number is actually listing it on the web. The phone number harvesting tool has yet to crawl through sites that require authorisation or spread outside Russia and the Ukraine, he said, but future versions are likely to expanding indexing capabilities and geographical reach, Danchev warned.

The DIY phone number harvesting tool is an example of a wider trend of selling tools that once were exclusively available to sophisticated cybercriminals to less elite cybercrooks though underground forums. Services that offers a means to launch managed SMS flooding and phone ring flooding have recently become available through these forums. Both managed SMS flooding and phone ring flooding are pitched as a means to “take care of your competitor’s phone lines” or a DDoS attack on phones instead of websites. However, these services might easily lend themselves to helping along more ambitious scams, such as flooding out a bank’s call centres to prevent early reports of card fraud cash-out operations, according to Webroot.

“By starting to advertise these very same malicious (DIY) tools and services on publicly accessible forums, they’re proving that they’re willing to sacrifice a certain degree of OPSEC (Operational Security) for the sake of growing their business model and attracting new customers,” Danchev reports. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/14/phone_harvesting_service_creates_spam_menace/

Spanish police have arrested 11 individuals suspected of running a €1m a year ransomware scam using malware that posed as a message from law enforcement.

Law enforcement agencies in Spain first became interested in the Reveton malware after hundreds of complaints from victims of the scam starting flooding in at the beginning of 2011. Trend Micro and the Spanish agencies worked with the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) at Europol in an operation coordinated by Interpol over the months that followed – sharing intelligence, samples and related technical detail. Police said the research allowed them to map of the criminal network infrastructure including traffic redirection and command-and-control servers. They then conducted raids on premises, seizing IT equipment and credit cards used to cash out the money that victims had paid.

In a statement (Spanish), cops said that since it was detected in May 2011, there had been more than 1,200 complaints about the so-called “POLICE VIRUS” (Reveton drive-by malware).

Police said this intelligence led to the arrest of 11 individuals. One of the suspects, an unnamed 27-year-old, is suspected to be the boss of the gang that produces the Reveton ransomware.

This Russian national was arrested in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Spanish authorities have filed an extradition warrant. Along with this key arrest, police said they had run a takedown operation focusing on the lower-ranked members of gang, in connection with which they made several additional arrests.

Police said lower-ranked members in the gang were involved in monetisation of the PaySafeCard/Ukash vouchers received as payment in the scam. The gang had a branch in Spain’s Costa Del Sol that exchanged these vouchers and converted them into real money, which would then be sent to the main group in Russia. Europol said in a separate statement:

The financial cell of the network specialised in laundering the proceeds of their crimes, obtained in the form of electronic money. For this, the gang employed both virtual systems for money laundering and other traditional systems using various online gaming portals, electronic payment gateways or virtual coins.

Spanish cops said 10 of the suspects had been arrested in connection with allegations of money-laundering activity. Six of the cuffed suspects are Russian, two Ukrainian and two Georgian, but all of them were based in Spain, police said.

Spanish cops reckon the fraudsters behind the scam were pulling in €1m a year.

“This coordinated activity (in much the same way as the Trend Micro/FBI action against the DNS Changer gang last year), leading directly to the arrest of individuals believed to be actively engaged in cybercrime, rather than simply taking down associated infrastructure, should serve as a model for how the security industry and law enforcement can effectively cooperate int he fight against online crime,” said Rik Ferguson, director of security research and communications at Trend Micro.

Trend Micro has blogged about the arrests here.

Police ransomware locks up systems and accuses the user of using illegal filesharing networks or of child abuse image distribution. The ransomware uses police logos to make it look like it came from a law enforcement agency to convince victims to cough a “fine” of around €100 using cash vouchers in order to unlock their computers. More details of the Reveton ransomware at the centre of the scam can be found here (PDF). ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/14/reveton_ransomware_arrests/

A security hole in Microsoft Office for Mac OS X is being exploited to hack and spy on Asian activists at odds with the Chinese government.

In the past few days, spear-phishing emails – highly targeted booby-trapped messages – were sent to Apple users in the Uyghur community, which is an ethnic group of people mostly (but not exclusively) living in Eastern and Central Asia. The community has long desired independence from Chinese rule.

The emails contained .doc files that exploit the MS09-027 vulnerability in Microsoft Office for Mac. That security hole allows miscreants to execute malicious code on the victim’s unpatched machine if the document is opened.

Ironically, one of the files reports the “rise in possible state-sponsored hacking”. Others bear filenames including “Concerns over Uyghur People”, “Uyghur Political Prisoner” and “Deported Uyghurs”. If successful, the attack installs a backdoor on the compromised Apple Mac, allowing hackers to remotely control the computer and spy on its user’s activities.

Last June, a batch of infected emails sent to Uyghur activists, and intercepted by security researchers at Kaspersky Lab, used a ZIP file containing a JPEG and a Mac OS X app that contained a Trojan. But the latest spear-phishing campaign attempts to exploit a Microsoft Office vulnerability that was fixed more than three years ago.

The latest attacks are explained in much more detail by Kaspersky Lab here and security tools firm AlienVault here.

Similar attacks have been hurled at other politically sensitive ethnic groups, such as the Tibetan people, and human-rights organisations for several years. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/14/uyghur_office_for_mac_cyberspying/

Vulnerability researchers at FireEye are reporting that Adobe’s Reader software has a zero-day flaw that hackers are already exploiting in the wild.

You’ve been pwned (click to enlarge)

The flaw is found in Adobe Reader 9.5.3, 10.1.5, and 11.0.1 and involves sending a specially crafted file to the target. Once opened, the malware installs two DLLs – one that shows an error message and opens a decoy PDF document, and a second that opens a backdoor to allow the code to communicate with a remote server.

“We have already submitted the sample to the Adobe security team. Before we get confirmation from Adobe and a mitigation plan is available, we suggest that you not open any unknown PDF files,” said the FireEye team in a blog post.

Adobe has responded with a brief blog post acknowledging that the problem has been noted and is being investigated further. No doubt its security engineers will be burning the midnight oil to investigate the issue and try and find a workaround or patch.

Those poor devils are having a very busy time of it this month. Last week Adobe rushed out two emergency patches for Flash after attackers started using them in active attacks. But while most people can get by without Flash, PDFs are another matter – by some estimates, Reader is on 90 per cent of PCs in the Western world.

Hackers realize this, of course, and Adobe’s products have been a primary attack vector for years now. And it’s not just Adobe having problems – the popular Foxit PDF reader plugin for web browsers got a zero-day exploit of its own in January that took nearly two weeks to fix. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/14/adobe_reader_flaw_fireeye/

Vulnerability researchers at FireEye are reporting that Adobe’s Reader software has a zero-day flaw that hackers are already exploiting in the wild.

You’ve been pwned (click to enlarge)

The flaw is found in Adobe Reader 9.5.3, 10.1.5, and 11.0.1 and involves sending a specially crafted file to the target. Once opened, the malware installs two DLLs – one that shows an error message and opens a decoy PDF document, and a second that opens a backdoor to allow the code to communicate with a remote server.

“We have already submitted the sample to the Adobe security team. Before we get confirmation from Adobe and a mitigation plan is available, we suggest that you not open any unknown PDF files,” said the FireEye team in a blog post.

Adobe has responded with a brief blog post acknowledging that the problem has been noted and is being investigated further. No doubt its security engineers will be burning the midnight oil to investigate the issue and try and find a workaround or patch.

Those poor devils are having a very busy time of it this month. Last week Adobe rushed out two emergency patches for Flash after attackers started using them in active attacks. But while most people can get by without Flash, PDFs are another matter – by some estimates, Reader is on 90 per cent of PCs in the Western world.

Hackers realize this, of course, and Adobe’s products have been a primary attack vector for years now. And it’s not just Adobe having problems – the popular Foxit PDF reader plugin for web browsers got a zero-day exploit of its own in January that took nearly two weeks to fix. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/14/adobe_reader_flaw_fireeye/

Vulnerability researchers at FireEye are reporting that Adobe’s Reader software has a zero-day flaw that hackers are already exploiting in the wild.

You’ve been pwned (click to enlarge)

The flaw is found in Adobe Reader 9.5.3, 10.1.5, and 11.0.1 and involves sending a specially crafted file to the target. Once opened, the malware installs two DLLs – one that shows an error message and opens a decoy PDF document, and a second that opens a backdoor to allow the code to communicate with a remote server.

“We have already submitted the sample to the Adobe security team. Before we get confirmation from Adobe and a mitigation plan is available, we suggest that you not open any unknown PDF files,” said the FireEye team in a blog post.

Adobe has responded with a brief blog post acknowledging that the problem has been noted and is being investigated further. No doubt its security engineers will be burning the midnight oil to investigate the issue and try and find a workaround or patch.

Those poor devils are having a very busy time of it this month. Last week Adobe rushed out two emergency patches for Flash after attackers started using them in active attacks. But while most people can get by without Flash, PDFs are another matter – by some estimates, Reader is on 90 per cent of PCs in the Western world.

Hackers realize this, of course, and Adobe’s products have been a primary attack vector for years now. And it’s not just Adobe having problems – the popular Foxit PDF reader plugin for web browsers got a zero-day exploit of its own in January that took nearly two weeks to fix. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/14/adobe_reader_flaw_fireeye/

Vulnerability researchers at FireEye are reporting that Adobe’s Reader software has a zero-day flaw that hackers are already exploiting in the wild.

You’ve been pwned (click to enlarge)

The flaw is found in Adobe Reader 9.5.3, 10.1.5, and 11.0.1 and involves sending a specially crafted file to the target. Once opened, the malware installs two DLLs – one that shows an error message and opens a decoy PDF document, and a second that opens a backdoor to allow the code to communicate with a remote server.

“We have already submitted the sample to the Adobe security team. Before we get confirmation from Adobe and a mitigation plan is available, we suggest that you not open any unknown PDF files,” said the FireEye team in a blog post.

Adobe has responded with a brief blog post acknowledging that the problem has been noted and is being investigated further. No doubt its security engineers will be burning the midnight oil to investigate the issue and try and find a workaround or patch.

Those poor devils are having a very busy time of it this month. Last week Adobe rushed out two emergency patches for Flash after attackers started using them in active attacks. But while most people can get by without Flash, PDFs are another matter – by some estimates, Reader is on 90 per cent of PCs in the Western world.

Hackers realize this, of course, and Adobe’s products have been a primary attack vector for years now. And it’s not just Adobe having problems – the popular Foxit PDF reader plugin for web browsers got a zero-day exploit of its own in January that took nearly two weeks to fix. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/14/adobe_reader_flaw_fireeye/

Vulnerability researchers at FireEye are reporting that Adobe’s Reader software has a zero-day flaw that hackers are already exploiting in the wild.

You’ve been pwned (click to enlarge)

The flaw is found in Adobe Reader 9.5.3, 10.1.5, and 11.0.1 and involves sending a specially crafted file to the target. Once opened, the malware installs two DLLs – one that shows an error message and opens a decoy PDF document, and a second that opens a backdoor to allow the code to communicate with a remote server.

“We have already submitted the sample to the Adobe security team. Before we get confirmation from Adobe and a mitigation plan is available, we suggest that you not open any unknown PDF files,” said the FireEye team in a blog post.

Adobe has responded with a brief blog post acknowledging that the problem has been noted and is being investigated further. No doubt its security engineers will be burning the midnight oil to investigate the issue and try and find a workaround or patch.

Those poor devils are having a very busy time of it this month. Last week Adobe rushed out two emergency patches for Flash after attackers started using them in active attacks. But while most people can get by without Flash, PDFs are another matter – by some estimates, Reader is on 90 per cent of PCs in the Western world.

Hackers realize this, of course, and Adobe’s products have been a primary attack vector for years now. And it’s not just Adobe having problems – the popular Foxit PDF reader plugin for web browsers got a zero-day exploit of its own in January that took nearly two weeks to fix. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/14/adobe_reader_flaw_fireeye/

Vulnerability researchers at FireEye are reporting that Adobe’s Reader software has a zero-day flaw that hackers are already exploiting in the wild.

You’ve been pwned (click to enlarge)

The flaw is found in Adobe Reader 9.5.3, 10.1.5, and 11.0.1 and involves sending a specially crafted file to the target. Once opened, the malware installs two DLLs – one that shows an error message and opens a decoy PDF document, and a second that opens a backdoor to allow the code to communicate with a remote server.

“We have already submitted the sample to the Adobe security team. Before we get confirmation from Adobe and a mitigation plan is available, we suggest that you not open any unknown PDF files,” said the FireEye team in a blog post.

Adobe has responded with a brief blog post acknowledging that the problem has been noted and is being investigated further. No doubt its security engineers will be burning the midnight oil to investigate the issue and try and find a workaround or patch.

Those poor devils are having a very busy time of it this month. Last week Adobe rushed out two emergency patches for Flash after attackers started using them in active attacks. But while most people can get by without Flash, PDFs are another matter – by some estimates, Reader is on 90 per cent of PCs in the Western world.

Hackers realize this, of course, and Adobe’s products have been a primary attack vector for years now. And it’s not just Adobe having problems – the popular Foxit PDF reader plugin for web browsers got a zero-day exploit of its own in January that took nearly two weeks to fix. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/14/adobe_reader_flaw_fireeye/