iOS Developer Site At Core of Facebook, Apple Watering Hole Attack

msm1267 writes "The missing link connecting the attacks against Apple, Facebook and possibly Twitter is a popular iOS mobile developers' forum called iphonedevsdk which was discovered hosting malware in an apparent watering hole attack that has likely snared victims at hundreds of organizations beyond the big three. It's not clear whether the site remains infected, but researcher Eric Romang dug into the situation and determined that the site was hosting malicious JavaScript that was redirecting visitors to another site, min.liveanalytics. That site had been hosting malware as of Jan. 15."

Comments

Mac Users Do a Software Update

[BasilBrush]

The fix to patch the vulnerability and remove the malware if it's there is available today. Mac users should do a software update.

Re:Mac Users Do a Software Update

[_xeno_]

The fix to patch the vulnerability and remove the malware if it's there is available today.

The keyword there is "today." The actual Java patch was available earlier, it's just Apple only bothered patching their version of Java until - well, after they got bitten by the vulnerability, apparently. Apple had been content to just say "applets are no longer supported" and leave it at that.

Re:Okay.... this is a new one.

[ThisIsSaei]

It's where you target a page used by multiple targets. Here a mobile developers forum was hit, that forum was not the real target but the people who use it frquently were. "Poisoning the watering hole" if you will.

Re:Okay.... this is a new one.

[rb12345]

Traditionally, you had "spear phishing" attacks which had attackers sending malware or phishing emails directly to their targets. This is relatively easy to spot and filter. The "watering hole" attacks work by compromising a trusted third-party site used by the targets. For example, if your attacker know you read Slashdot or use some specialised forum site, they could attempt to compromise those sites and use them to host exploits as part of the normal pages (infected banner ads or modified page content).

Re:LOL

[_xeno_]

Not exactly.

They stopped supporting future versions of Java - namely, Java 7. They still support Java 6.

In theory, by now, Java 6 support should have been dropped and Java 6 should no longer be updated at all. However, due to problems with Java 7, and compatibility issues between Apple Java and Oracle Java on Mac OS X, Java 6 lives on and is still being updated.

The Apple update to Java 6 was delivered through Software Update by Apple as an OS update. Java 6 is still done by Apple. At some point, Apple will drop support for Java entirely and the only way to run Java on Mac OS X will be to install it from Oracle.

In fact, this should have happened already. But it hasn't, yet. The next version of Mac OS X will presumably drop support for Apple's Java entirely, but as of today, it still lives on, and patches for it still come from Apple.