App Store-Aided Mobile Attacks

Trailrunner7 sends along a ThreatPost.com piece that begins "The pace of innovation on mobile phones and other smart wireless devices has accelerated greatly in the last few years. ... But now the attackers are beginning to outstrip the good guys on mobile platforms, developing innovative new attacks and methods for stealing data that rival anything seen on the desktop, experts say. This particular attack vector — introducing malicious or Trojaned applications into mobile app stores — has the potential to become a very serious problem, researchers say. Tyler Shields, a security researcher at Veracode who developed a proof-of-concept spyware application for the BlackBerry earlier this year, said that the way app stores are set up and their relative lack of safeguards makes them soft targets for attackers. ... 'There are extremely technical approaches like the OS attacks, but that stuff is much harder to do,' Shields said. 'From the attacker's standpoint, it's too much effort when you can just drop something into the app store. It comes down to effort versus reward. The spyware Trojan approach will be the future of crime. Why spend time popping boxes when you can get the users to own the boxes themselves? If you couple that with custom Trojans and the research I've done, it's super scary.'"

Comments

iPhone Banker Trojan?

[Graff]

From the article:

Banker Trojans targeting platforms such as the iPhone

[citation needed]

I poked around the internets a bit and only found a mention or two for iPhone trojans. These trojans were ONLY on jailbroken iPhones, not un-jailbroken ones that are using the iPhone App Store. As far as I know there have never been any "banker" trojans in the iPhone App Store.

This article seems to be riding the coattails of the iPhone's popularity by throwing it in the mix with other platforms that have had "banker" trojans. If they have evidence of an iPhone App Store trojan I'd love for them to directly mention it rather than being vague and doing a lot of hand-waving.

Open Store, Open Door...

[LostCluster]

As much as we hate Apple's walled-garden approach to an app store, having a central authority with a kill switch for any app, plus limited multitasking ability, plus developers tied to using the app store's preferred programming language and tools are all things that stand in the way of a would be trojan spyware author. As Apple claims, jailbreaking your iPhone could all "the enemy" to do what they want with it, and that could crush poor little American Telegraph and Telephone Co.'s network.

Google touts openness, and Microsoft touts the power of a free-market of commercial software, both of which provide nice benefits to the consumer, but also to the hacker who wants to compromise user privacy. Has anybody looked into the Facebook apps on these platforms?

Re:Open Store, Open Door...

[mjwx]

Google touts openness,

Android has on-device security which let the user know, in simple English what the application will do ("can access your contacts", "uses services that cost you money (SMS, makes phone calls)", "will access the internet") so when you download a fart application that wants access to your contacts and to the internet you have to figure out something isn't right.

As much as we hate Apple's walled-garden approach to an app store, having a central authority with a kill switch for any app,

But that isn't so useful as Apple's walled garden approach has forgone local security in favour of gateway only security, once you've gotten past the censors you have a free reign. Enterprises have known for some time that gateway only security is a complete and utter failure. You need both gateway and local security, which Android provides both although the gateway security is entirely voluntary (but enabled by default).

There have already been data miners for the Iphone that have gotten past Apple's ever watchful censors including at least one fake banking application (BOA, IIRC). This isn't including data miners like Arsebook.

Ultimately gateway and local security is preferred for end users, one should have a choice whether to use the gateway or not but local security is an absolute must, especially on a mobile device. Despite how good you think your gateway is it is fundamentally flawed.

That was a close call

[Gadget_Guy]

Wow. I was going to download some apps from one of those app stores. I can't believe I nearly exposed my phone to something even more dangerous than anything on my PC. In future, I am going to just limit myself to downloading whacky screensavers for my Windows system, because that is totally unlike downloading an app for my phone.

Seriously, I can't believe the gall of those attention-seeking media whores who call themselves security experts. Years after we have been able to download applications for phones, some nitwit finally realises that one of those apps could be harmful. All they have to do is blow the danger out of all proportion and wait for the stupid media to lap up the story.

"But this time it is different - instead of downloading the app from a website, you get them from an app store!" Yeah, right.

Re:That was a close call

[gig]

That is bullshit. They not only check for malware, they even check for privacy violations and use of unfinished API's that may break in a future OS release. The whole app platform was designed for approvals.

You can't say iPhone is doing it wrong because it's not open on one day and then say it's just as vulnerable to malware as Android the next. We know Apple is not as vulnerable because they have not had any malware through 2 years of a billion downloads and over 200,000 apps, while Android Market has served malware with significantly fewer apps and downloads. And most of Apple's users do not know WTF "malware" is, which is why they do it this way.

On blackberry? Not so much

[Jeffrey Baker]

Any app on the blackberry requires user intervention before it's allowed to fetch URLs, open raw sockets, read email, dial the phone, get your location, manipulate the address book, or do any other damned thing. And 90% of the APIs require the developer to be vetted through the app signing process. It actually seems much less vulnerable to trojans and spyware than a PC.

Perhaps this will evolve into something beneficial

[Dr_Marvin_Monroe]

I agree with the poster that the economics of attacks is definitely in favor of the Trojan vs. the technical attack. It's scary how many people install junk on their computers, and it's not getting any better. Even I do it sometimes without knowing 100% who's behind some utility or patch that I want. This is the approach that pays off easy too. Why bother trying to sneek into their box when the user's will install your bug for you?

In nature though, some of these parasites actually evolve into beneficial bugs. The take their little bit, but they also do some extra bit for the host. Both sides win, this is symbiosis. Imagine that the SETI@home also defragmented your disks or optimized performance some how in exchange for running on your system, same thing.

Now consider for a second that Conficker patched some security holes after entering the host system....Isn't it doing some little bit of good? Not wanting it on my box, just showing how Conficker's security is also beneficial to the host machine. Their goals align... Consider also, how does Google's goals align with mine when I use online Docs?

I think there will be a real blending here. Trojans will get more beneficial and less intrusive, people will tolerate them because they do something useful, and a new class of free (as in beer) software will evolve.

Clearly unfair to Apple

[gig]

You can't tell me how wrong Apple is for having a closed store with strict app approvals and how other mobile makers will outdo Apple with their open stores and then wrote a malware-scare article about how app stores are too open and lump Apple in with everyone else. It's one or the other. Everyone else has Jas apps you can install from the Web and Apple has C apps you can't.

Apple has an actual record here. They've been malware-free 100% for 2 years, 200,000 apps, over 1 billion downloads, with consumer users who don't know what malware is, doing 1-click installs.

How you can write an article like this saying "app stores should be more closed" and not mention Apple's is closed is beyond me.

And there has been no native malware on iPhone. Also bullshit.

And although Apple may not strictly guarantee zero malware, they are actively policing every app. To pretend that's like having no cops, as on the other platforms, is ridiculous.

Awful article. Just fucking awful. Do some fucking research!

Re:Clearly unfair to Apple

[Rocketship Underpant]

My guess: there's a rather popular hate-the-leader bandwagon among certain geeks. You see this on Reddit a lot, where anything critical of the iPhone or iPad gets modded up immediately whether it's insightful or not.

This author is probably part of that bandwagon, desperately trying to stitch together a premise (open app stores are an opportunity for trojans) and an incorrect conclusion (fear the iPhone!) with no logical connection. Why else use App Store like a proper noun in the title, knowing full-well that most people will immediately assume the iPhone/iPad App Store?

Anyone who's owned a Mac a long time and constantly been lectured by their PC-using friends that "Macs are just as susceptible to viruses" even though no one gets viruses on their Macs while PCs are like leper colonies for malware knows this full well.

Re:I like the yum "app store"

[Anonymous Coward]

companies have been obfuscating the hell out of source code for a while now

I believe it's called outsourcing.

Re:I like the yum "app store"

[eggnoglatte]

Well, FWIW, it is kind of hard to do much damage if the app can't run in the background due to lack of multithreading.

No, I don't have an iPhone, iPod, or iPad. I am just getting tired of the same old tirades from both sides.