Zero-Day Warning: It’s Possible to Hack iPhones Just by Sending Emails

According to cybersecurity researchers at ZecOps, the
vulnerabilities in question are out-of-bounds write and remote heap
overflow issues, one of them is a dangerous ‘zero-click‘
flaw that can be exploited without requiring any interaction from
the targeted recipients.

Both remote code execution flaws reside in the MIME library of
the mail app that can get triggered while processing the email
content. These flaws existed for the last 8 years since the release
of iOS 6 and also affect the latest iOS 13.4.1.

What’s more worrisome is that multiple groups of attackers are
already exploiting these flaws—for at least 2 years as zero-days in
the wild—to target individuals from various industries and
organizations, MSSPs from Saudi Arabia and Israel, and journalists
in Europe.

“With very limited data, we were able to see that at least six
organizations were impacted by this vulnerability – and the full
scope of abuse of this vulnerability is enormous,” the researchers
said^[1].

“While ZecOps refrain from attributing these attacks to a
specific threat actor, we are aware that at least one
‘hackers-for-hire’ organization is selling exploits using
vulnerabilities that leverage email addresses as the main
identifier.”

“Noteworthy, although the data confirms that the exploit emails
were received and processed by victims’ iOS devices, corresponding
emails that should have been received and stored on the mail-server
were missing. Therefore, we infer that these emails were deleted
intentionally as part of an attack’s operational security cleanup
measures,” the researchers said.

“Besides a temporary slowdown of a mobile mail application, users
should not observe any other anomalous behavior.”

To be noted, on successful exploitation, the vulnerability runs
malicious code in the context of the MobileMail or maild
application, allowing attackers “to leak, modify, and delete
emails.” However, to remotely take full control over the device,
attackers need to chain it together with a separate kernel
vulnerability.

ZecOps discovered these flaws and in-the-wild-attacks almost two
months ago and reported it to the Apple security team.

At the time of writing, only the beta 13.4.5 version of iOS that
was released last week contains security patches for both zero-day
vulnerabilities.

For all iPhone and iPad users, a software patch will soon be
available in an upcoming iOS update, but meanwhile, users are
strongly advised to do not use built-in mail application; and
instead switch to Outlook or Gmail apps.