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posted by Fnord666 on Monday October 02 2017, @11:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the ground-beef dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow5743

A serious vulnerability that remains unfixed in many Android devices is under active exploit, marking the first known time real-world attackers have used it to bypass key security protections built in to the mobile operating system.

Dirty Cow, as the vulnerability has been dubbed, came to light last October after lurking in the kernel of the Linux operating system for nine years. While it amounts to a mere privilege-escalation bug—as opposed to a more critical code-execution flaw—several characteristics make it particularly potent. For one, the vulnerability is located in a part of the Linux kernel that's almost universally available. And for another, reliable exploits are relatively easy to develop.

By the time it was disclosed, it was already under active exploit on Linux servers. Within days of its disclosure, researchers and hobbyists were using the vulnerability, indexed as CVE-2016-5195, to root Android phones.

Now, more than 1,200 apps available in third-party marketplaces are exploiting Dirty Cow as part of a scam that uses text-based payment services to make fraudulent charges to the phone owner, researchers from antivirus provider Trend Micro reported on Monday.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/09/in-a-first-android-apps-abuse-serious-dirty-cow-bug-to-backdoor-phones/


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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday October 02 2017, @02:23PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Monday October 02 2017, @02:23PM (#575902) Journal
    This isn't quite so bad with Apple Pay, because the card details are stored in the secure element, where they can't be accessed by code running on the application processor, and where they will simply sign transactions. Malware that compromises the iOS kernel could potentially create a load of fraudulent payments, but it couldn't exfiltrate the card details. Most Google Pay implementations don't have an equivalent of the secure element (though a few do), so an OS compromise can extract the card info directly.
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