Tech giant Apple is yet to roll out a security patch for a newly discovered iPhone vulnerability. As per security researchers, this flaw has already been made use of by hackers to steal data from unsuspecting victims. The news spread after Zuk Avraham from security firm ZecOps said that the company had discovered a new bug last year during a routine investigation. Further, he said that the bug was used to attack at least six organizations since as early as 2018.
According to Avraham, the bug lies in the iPhone’s default Mail application. If an attacker were to send a certain specially crafted email to the victim’s device, he could overrun the device’s memory, which could allow remote execution of malicious code. Further, this could be used to steal data from the device.
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What Apple iOS versions are affected?
The bug has apparently been present since iOS 6, which was first released in 2012. Further, the latest iOS 13 is the worst affected version. This is because, on the latest versions of iOS 13, the bug doesn’t even need interaction by the victim. However, macOS, Apple’s operating system for its computers, is not vulnerable, confirmed Avraham.
Similar security flaws in iPhones have proven to be some of the biggest and even most paying bugs. The Cupertino-based company will often pay up to $50,000 to anyone who can spot similar bugs, as part of a bug-bounty program. Such exploits are often used against targets, being implemented by criminals and terrorists in highly precise operations. However, as per a report by TechCrunch, exploits like these are also used by some governments to target certain ethnic groups.
Avraham further added in his blog post that the attacks that made use of the bug included victims in a Fortune 500 company and a journalist in Europe. While attackers were not named, Avraham suggested that a nation-state was one of the attackers. Apple is expected to soon launch a stable update with the flaw taken care of. Apparently, it has already been fixed in a beta update.
