> We believe that the main reason for this incident is the proprietary nature of iOS. This operating system is a “black box”, in which spyware like Triangulation can hide for years. Detecting and analyzing such threats is made all the more difficult by Apple’s monopoly of research tools – making it a perfect haven for spyware. In other words, as I’ve often said, users are given the illusion of security associated with the complete opacity of the system. What actually happens in iOS is unknown to cybersecurity experts, and the absence of news about attacks in no way indicates their being impossible – as we’ve just seen.
Shatters Apple's argument that all of these hurdles are better for security. I wonder if testimony like this could affect any of their antitrust lawsuits or right to repair lobbying.
Not "shatters", as while it is a valid counter, it doesn't tell you the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches, only that Apple isn't perfect which should already have been assumed.
A stronger counter to Apple's argument is the relative pricing of exploits… but the story I'm remembering is old enough that I don't want to just assume it's still true, even though it's near the top of my search results:
It doesn't really shatter anything does it? People here are going to understand that there are trade-offs to every decision made.
I suspect iOS is not worse than the more open Android simply because senior management at Kaspersky are using iPhones. If anybody is choosing their platform with security in mind, it has to be them and they are going with iOS.
And on that same page it says the Android version didn’t even require an exploit. The sneakiest thing that was required on Android was to write the word “Samsung” on the app icon so that users would click it.
Near the end, they say:
> This campaign is a good reminder that attackers do not always use exploits to achieve the permissions they need.
> It's absurd to say a company should not blow the whistle on a sophisticated attack when that companys job is just that!
They should definitely do it.
They should also acknowledge that they did a shoddy job. They let the malware run unchecked for several years. It is clear that the safeguards they had in place did not work, not for protection, but especially for detection.
Instead, they chose to boost the image of their own products and bash a third party vendor with a questionable reasoning.
> Shatters Apple's argument that all of these hurdles are better for security.
Sorry I don't buy that this "shatters" anything besides peoples misguided assumptions that anything can be perfectly secure without being fully disconnected.
Apple's iOS 16 supports iphone 8 which was released in 2017, 5 years ago.
Apple's iOs 15 supported iphone 6 which was released in 2015, 7 years ago.
> Samsung’s previous promise to provide three years of upgrades and ensures millions of Galaxy users have access to the latest features for security, productivity, visual experience and more, for as long as they own their device.
> Samsung will now provide up to five years of security updates to help protect select Galaxy devices
They do mention 5 years of updates but only for _select_ galaxy devices (presumably the top of the line).
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I am assuming anyone rooting/flashing is taking way more risks and security concerns into their own hands. But in length of support/security updates alone apple is winning.
I also wonder how long it actually takes a vulnerability patch (let's say for a zero day) to get out on android and then through OEM security updates. (I haven't been android in too long to know this.) Apple actually just released a way for them to do this and have already used it once, they call it "Rapid Security Responses" (which you can switch off although idk why you would).
Because they were deceived by Apple's quality promises?
If Apple really wanted to improve security (instead of just producing marketing claims about it) they would provide anyone with debugging symbols, root privileges and anything else needed for research and debugging.
It's entirely rational to have believed iPhone to be more secure in the past, now believe Android is more secure, and yet remain on iPhone:
1. At some point, weigh probabilities of exploits
2. Update Bayesian priors as new evidence arrives
3. Even if the initial decision currently appears incorrect, there needs to be a high enough difference in probability to justify switching, because in switching, you're still exposed to any persistent exploitation via the old exploits plus new exploits on the new platform
Switching back and forth the instant your Bayesian prior swings over/under 50% for Android being more secure than iPhone is a terrible strategy. (Also, you need to risk-weight your various exploit probabilities... security is a multidimensional quantity, so collapsing to a scalar is at least context-/threat-model-dependent.)
I guess everyone at Kaspersky knew the risk of an attack was non-zero given their industry profile. Their SIEM finally caught it, albeit it is arguable if the detection was timely and as others in the thread have pointed out, their MDM should have detected the upgrade failures or version issues. We will probably hear about it in the detailed paper/presentation later.
Their rant on the closed nature of the ios ecosystem is more around Apple's hold on the research tools. That is what I took from the statement, among other things.
Actually, Apple should consider making iMessage open source.
Given it is such a popular attack vector, it probably benefits the ios ecosystem to take the benefit of open source scrutiny. There are other messaging apps like Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram etc., So, it is not like a copycat would suddenly emerge and threaten Apple's position. Apple hold the keys to the app store anyway and can review any potential copycat (supposedly malicious one) and prevent it from being released.
Right you can turn off getting any messages entirely and deregister your phone from their network. I believe what I was remembering was you can't swap out the primary SMS receiving app like you can on Android. Unless something changed. Not everyone like's to live in a security bubble w/o phone access, even the security minded.
That one of the bigger security companies seemingly didn't have MDM screaming bloody murder or outright blocking authentication for an endpoint this out of date is more than a little concerning.
Props to their SIEM for detecting it in the end, but this seems like it could've been detected and remediated a few weeks in (assuming it didn't also have the ability to spoof the iOS version).
> We identified that the latest version of iOS that was targeted by Triangulation is 15.7. However, given the sophistication of the cyberespionage campaign and the complexity of analysis of iOS platform, we can’t guarantee that other versions of iOS are not affected.
Indeed, the identified fix involves a factory reset and upgrading iOS to prevent the malware from taking over again.
That provides a simple explanation for why the phones are running such an old version: because they've been infected and unable to be updated for that entire time.
I guess execs at security firms are no better than average people when it comes to noticing that their phones never got the various new features (end emojis!) from the last year of OS updates.
> We have developed and made freely available the triangle_check utility, that can detect indicators of compromise in an Apple device backup. Detailed instructions on how to use it under different OSs (Windows, Linux and macOS), as well as how to create a device backup can be found in a post on Securelist. [1]
The oldest traces of infection that we discovered happened in 2019. As of the time of writing in June 2023, the attack is ongoing, and the most recent version of the devices successfully targeted is iOS 15.7.
I was surprised at how low it was on the front page, and how quickly it disappeared. But I never saw a "flagged" indicator on it. I thought that flagged posts typically had these indicators — is this not the case?
"An indirect indication of the presence of Triangulation on the device is the disabling of the ability to update iOS"
My guess would be that they didn't find out thanks to their monitoring solution, but because some senior manager shouted pretty loudly at someone to get their iPhone to update, asap! :)
You make it sound like big tech companies never cooperate with the law enforcement. I bet CIA and FBI have their hand so far up Zuck’s ass it’s almost like Minority Report at this point.
I'm not even sure which SCO is under discussion here, the unix one, Pakistan's "Special Communications Organization", the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, or if Scotland is up to something surprising, or if it's one of several "State Controller's Office" and "Special Counsel's Office" in the USA…
I mean, unless you live in Middle East and one day they say you have WMD and they destroy your whole country. If you live in the EU or the US - then yes.
Do you have any sources for this? I'm interested in reading more about it after seeing a lot of allegations. I don't recall ever seeing anything concrete.
Literally one google search gave me this.[1] You could have saved a lot of time writing "Kaspersky FSB GRU" in google than writing this comment to someone to cite their sources.
Could you quote a paragraph from that article that supports the claim
> Kaspersky was spying on international citizens for over a decade, providing data for both the FSB and GRU.
I read it through twice and aside from implication the strongest assertion was that Bloomberg had seen emails that confirmed Kaspersky had worked with the FSB to supply anti-DDOS systems that included counter measures (the ability to hack and disrupt hackers attacking systems) which wasn't denied by Kaspersky who maintained they do similar work with many governments and their 3-letter-agencies.
There's apparently an entire wiki on the subject and again it's mostly speculation, misunderstanding (ie, in the NSA case), or as you said misrepresenting what was essentially a pretty innocuous defensive gov contract by an infosec company.
> users are given the illusion of security associated with the complete opacity of the system. What actually happens in iOS is unknown to cybersecurity experts, and the absence of news about attacks in no way indicates their being impossible
For this to change the community needs to create the needed tools. I don't think Apple will ever help you with something that can potentially make them look bad.
tl;dr - malicious state and private threat actors can at any time completely take over your iphone (root access) with an invisible iMessage without you having a practical chance to detect it besides scanning your iphone backup
They said it can infect iOS 15.7. I just looked and it appears 15.7.1 was released 10/27/22. And the malware apparently quietly blocks OS updates and can survive full hardware resets.
If you were fully updated to the latest iOS last October and got infected, it would keep you infected. They also said they found the malware has been deployed in the wild since at least 2019 and this is the first discovery o. f it. And it appears to be a fully remote, stealth infection against all iPhones.
I'm no expert on security (or iOS) but it sounds pretty much like worst case to me.
how is this generally possible? In my simplified understanding, a text message is a hunk of data, but I know it's more complex than that.... it must be able to connect to all kinds of services and trigger all kinds of code running, right? Can't it be sanity checked sufficiently?
Even if it would be a simple text message (which its not for iphone), it triggers a text parser at minimum. That parser can have carious bugs in it, ie if parser checks phone contacts to highlight phone number in text as a known contact, identifies some weblink etc.
To sum it up to have it as fancy as possible to users it checks various things and needs permissions for that. Enough 0days in the chain and you can do whatever you need.
This is the problem of closed systems, you have to trust manufacturer 100%, there is no independent audit possible. And if you ever did any serious code before, you know by heart that any code has bugs, in the code, in platform/VM it runs, apis etc.
Apparently, it uses iMessage's proprietary messaging format, not standard text messages. I don't use iOS but my understanding is users can't replace iMessage with another messaging app.
> my understanding is users can't replace iMessage with another messaging app.
To be precise there is one "Messaging" app, that automagically uses iMessage (blue bubbles) instead of SMS (green bubbles) whenever possible. One can turn off iMessage in the settings, which will probably lead to your iPhone rejecting iMessages, making other iPhones only send SMS to you and also make your iPhone only send SMS. Whether that toggle prevents receiving and processing of malicious, invisible iMessages is an entirely different question.
Theoretically yes. However, the chance of you encountering a second hand device with such an implant is relatively low I'd say.
I guess if you buy it off journalists or activists the chance would be higher but still relatively unlikely. But as with anything, consider if it suits your threat model and act accordingly.
hardware modifications definitely can. A few years ago I've read ([0] - the article is in russian but google translate does its job) about hardware bugs installed in iphones - with a mic and an own SIM card, everything is powered from the phone's battery.
> What actually happens in iOS is unknown to cybersecurity experts
Sounds like a skill issue to me. I'll eat my words if they were genuinely infected with something that lingered in such a way that it persisted past a reboot and completely broke all updates, but I would be very surprised if this was the case.
Why would an actor with a reliable zero-click need to persist past a reboot? That appears to be the claim in the article, update blocking plus on-demand reinfection.
Didn’t read the article, because on my oldish phone the cookie options defaulted to disallowing necessary cookies and allowing all others. I’m fairly confident this is a bug
> We believe that the main reason for this incident is the proprietary nature of iOS. This operating system is a “black box”, in which spyware like Triangulation can hide for years. Detecting and analyzing such threats is made all the more difficult by Apple’s monopoly of research tools – making it a perfect haven for spyware. In other words, as I’ve often said, users are given the illusion of security associated with the complete opacity of the system. What actually happens in iOS is unknown to cybersecurity experts, and the absence of news about attacks in no way indicates their being impossible – as we’ve just seen.