Apple last year released a new feature for iPhone users who are concerned about being attacked with sophisticated spyware, such as journalists or human rights defenders. Now, the researchers say they have found evidence that the feature: called lock mode — helped block an attack by hackers using spyware created by the infamous mercenary hacking vendor NSO Group.
On Tuesday, the cybersecurity and human rights research group Citizen Lab published a report analyzing three new zero-day vulnerabilities in iOS 15 and iOS 16, which means that Apple was not aware of the vulnerabilities at the time they were released used to aim at least two Mexican human rights defenders.
One of those exploits was blocked by Lockdown Mode, the researchers found. Lockdown mode was specifically designed to reduce the attack surface of iPhone – cybersecurity jargon refers to parts of code or features of a system that are prone to hacker attacks. This is the first documented case where lockdown mode has successfully protected someone from a targeted attack.
In the recent cases, Citizen Lab researchers said the targets’ iPhones blocked the hacking attempts and displayed a notification saying that lockdown mode was preventing someone from accessing the phone’s Home app. The researchers, however, note that it is possible that, at some point, NSO exploit developers “may have figured out a way to fix the notification issue, such as by fingerprinting the lockdown mode.”
As other researchers have pointed out in the past, it is easy to take fingerprints of users to determine who has lockdown mode on, but that is not to say that its protections are not significant. As this case found by Citizen Lab shows, lockdown mode can be effective.
“The fact that lockdown mode appears to have thwarted and even notified targets of a zero-click attack in the real world shows that it is a powerful mitigation and is cause for great optimism,” Bill Marczak, Principal Researcher at Citizen Lab. and one of the report’s authors, told TechCrunch. “But, as with any optional feature, the devil is always in the details. How many people will choose to activate lockdown mode? Will attackers just stop exploiting Apple apps and target third-party apps, which are harder to protect for lockdown mode?
Apple spokesman Scott Radcliffe said in a statement: “We are pleased to see that Block Mode interrupted this sophisticated attack and alerted users immediately, even before Apple and security researchers were aware of the specific threat. Our security teams around the world will continue to work tirelessly to advance lockdown mode and strengthen security and privacy protections in iOS.”
NSO Group spokesman Liron Bruck did not respond to a series of questions, instead sending a statement saying that “Citizen Lab has repeatedly produced reports that are unable to determine the technology in use and refuse to share their underlying data. NSO adheres to strict regulation and its technology is used by its government clients to combat terrorism and crime around the world.”
The Citizen Lab report identified three different exploits, all “zero click”, meaning they required no interaction on the part of the target, by analyzing several phones suspected of being hacked with NSO spyware, aka like Pegasus.
Pegasus, which NSO sells exclusively to government customers, can remotely obtain a phone’s location, messages, photos, and pretty much anything the phone’s rightful owner can access. Over the years, researchers from Citizen Lab, Amnesty International and other organizations have documented several cases in which NSO’s customers used the company’s spyware to attack journalists, human rights defendersand opposition politicians.
The new Citizen Lab findings show that NSO is still alive and well, despite a rough couple of years. In 2021, an international consortium of media organizations launched Project Pegasus, a series of articles detailing scandals involving NSOs around the world. Later that same year, the US government placed NSO in a deniereffectively barring any US company or individual from doing business with the company.
“Other companies have withdrawn, but, at least for now, NSO can still bear these increased costs, and Pegasus remains an active threat to global civil society,” Marczak said.
From the recent batch of exploits: The first exploit was deployed in January 2022 by NSO customers and exploited the iPhone’s FindMy feature, which helps owners locate their lost or stolen phones. The second exploit was deployed as of June 2022 and is a “two-step” exploit, meaning it targets two features, in this case the FindMy and iMessage feature. And the latest exploit, implemented as of October 2022, exploited the iPhone’s HomeKit and iMessage functionalities.
Citizen Lab reported all of these exploits to Apple, which has since pushed out updates and reduced the attack surface. Apple fixed the HomeKit-based vulnerability in iOS 16.3.1, released in February.
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