Recently, Yasser Allam, known by the pseudonym inzo_, and I, decided to team up for some research. We discussed potential targets and chose to begin by focusing on Next.js (130K stars on github, currently downloaded + 9,4 million times per week), a framework I know quite well and with which I already have fond memories, as evidenced by my previous work. Therefore, the “we” throughout this paper will naturally refer to the two of us.
Next.js is a comprehensive javascript framework based on React, packed with numerous features — the perfect playground for diving into the intricacies of research. We set out, fueled by faith, curiosity, and resilience, to explore its lesser-known aspects, hunting for hidden treasures waiting to be found.
It didn’t take long before we uncovered a great discovery in the middleware. The impact is considerable, with all versions affected, and no preconditions for exploitability — as we’ll demonstrate shortly.
This one is a privesc bug yielding SYSTEM privileges for any VDI user, which is actually a lot worse than it might initially sound since that’s SYSTEM privileges on the server that hosts all the applications and access is ‘by design’ - allowing an attacker to impersonate any user (including administrators) and monitor behaviour, connectivity.
people frequently reach out to me with companies to look into. usually it takes me about 10 minutes before i move on for one reason or another—it's not interesting for a story or has good security, for example. i didnt expect anything different when an acquaintance told me about Tracki, a self-proclaimed "world leader in GPS tracking" that they suspected could be used nefariously.
at first glance, Tracki appeared to be a serious company, maybe even one that cared about security. we could never have guessed what was about to unfold before us.
half a year into our investigation, we'd found it all: a hidden conglomerate posing as five independent companies, masked from governments and customers alike through the use of dozens of false identities, US letterbox companies, and an undeclared owner. a 90s phone sex scheme that, through targeting by one of hollywood's most notorious fixers, spiraled into a collection of almost a hundred domains advertising everything from online dating to sore throat remedies. a slew of device-assisted murder cases, on top of potential data breaches affecting almost 12 million users, ranging from federal government officials to literal infants. and most importantly, a little-known Snoop Dogg song. how in the world did we get here?
starting our descent
Microsoft warns that the Russian APT28 threat group exploits a Windows Print Spooler vulnerability to escalate privileges and steal credentials and data using a previously unknown hacking tool called GooseEgg.
#APT28 #Computer #Credential #Escalation #Exploit #GooseEgg #InfoSec #NSA #Print #Privilege #Security #Spooler #Theft #Windows
In a previous blog post we described a process injection vulnerability affecting all AppKit-based macOS applications. This research was presented at Black Hat USA 2022, DEF CON 30 and Objective by the Sea v5. This vulnerability was actually the second universal process injection vulnerability we reported to Apple, but it was fixed earlier than the first. Because it shared some parts of the exploit chain with the first one, there were a few steps we had to skip in the earlier post and the presentations. Now that the first vulnerability has been fixed in macOS 13.0 (Ventura) and improved in macOS 14.0 (Sonoma), we can detail the first one and thereby fill in the blanks of the previous post.
This vulnerability was independently found by Adam Chester and written up here under the name “DirtyNIB”. While the exploit chain demonstrated by Adam shares a lot of similarity to ours, our attacks trigger automatically and do not require a user to click a button, making them a lot more stealthy. Therefore we decided to publish our own version of this write-up as well.
In April 2021 I participated in Pwn2Own Vancouvver competition as a single player, and successfully demonstrated a 0-day virtual machine escape exploit with code execution on Parallels hypervisor. Today I am finally releasing the exploit source code together with a technical walkthrough video talk that I gave on Zero Day Engineering livestream in November 2021.