On Monday, CheckPoint found two flaws in LG phones that if used by someone with some amount of skill, can allow remote hijacking of the device. Here’s details from ZDNET:
Check Point mobile security researcher Adam Donenfeld said the first security weakness, CVE-2016-3117, was discovered in LG’s privileged service. Dubbed LGATCMDService, the service is not protected by bind permissions, which means that any application — regardless of its origins — can communicate with it.
“By connecting to this service, an attacker could address atd, a high-privileged user mode daemon and a gateway for communications with the firmware,” the researcher says.
If exploited, this could lead to privilege escalation and device hijacking, rebooting, disabling USB connections, wiping, identifying private IDs such as a device’s MAC address or completely bricking the device itself.
The second security flaw, CVE-2016-2035, lies within LG’s implementation of the WAP Push protocol. This protocol is used to send URLs to mobile devices through SMS messages, but due to LG’s implementation of the system, an SQL vulnerability is present.
Should an attacker compromise the device in this way, they could send an SMS message which allows them to view, modify or delete SMS messages stored on the device. Once compromised, this security flaw could also be used as a wider phishing scheme for more lucrative targets — such as a scam to access online bank accounts.
Patches should be out now to address these flaws, so you should be installing these patches if you own a LG phone. In the meantime, don’t download any apps via SMS to protect yourself.
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This entry was posted on June 2, 2016 at 9:55 am and is filed under Commentary with tags LG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Flaws Found In LG Phones That Permit Device Hijacking
On Monday, CheckPoint found two flaws in LG phones that if used by someone with some amount of skill, can allow remote hijacking of the device. Here’s details from ZDNET:
Check Point mobile security researcher Adam Donenfeld said the first security weakness, CVE-2016-3117, was discovered in LG’s privileged service. Dubbed LGATCMDService, the service is not protected by bind permissions, which means that any application — regardless of its origins — can communicate with it.
“By connecting to this service, an attacker could address atd, a high-privileged user mode daemon and a gateway for communications with the firmware,” the researcher says.
If exploited, this could lead to privilege escalation and device hijacking, rebooting, disabling USB connections, wiping, identifying private IDs such as a device’s MAC address or completely bricking the device itself.
The second security flaw, CVE-2016-2035, lies within LG’s implementation of the WAP Push protocol. This protocol is used to send URLs to mobile devices through SMS messages, but due to LG’s implementation of the system, an SQL vulnerability is present.
Should an attacker compromise the device in this way, they could send an SMS message which allows them to view, modify or delete SMS messages stored on the device. Once compromised, this security flaw could also be used as a wider phishing scheme for more lucrative targets — such as a scam to access online bank accounts.
Patches should be out now to address these flaws, so you should be installing these patches if you own a LG phone. In the meantime, don’t download any apps via SMS to protect yourself.
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This entry was posted on June 2, 2016 at 9:55 am and is filed under Commentary with tags LG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.