A fast-spreading Android spyware is mushrooming across Russia, camouflaging itself as popular apps like TikTok or YouTube, researchers at Zimperium have revealed in a blog post.

The company told CyberScoop they expect the campaign is likely to expand beyond Russian borders, too.

In three months, Zimperium zLabs researchers observed more than 600 samples, the company wrote in a blog post Thursday. Once implanted, the spyware can steal text messages, call logs, device information and more, and wrest control of a phone to do things like take pictures or place phone calls.

“It’s mainly targeting Russia, but they can always adapt to other payloads, and since every inflected phone then becomes an attack vector, it’s likely to become a global campaign,” said Nico Chiaraviglio, chief scientist at Zimperium. “However, it’s not easy to know the attackers’ intentions.”

The spyware, dubbed ClayRat, has some notable tools it uses to infect victims.

“ClayRat poses a serious threat not only because of its extensive surveillance capabilities, but also because of its abuse of Android’s default SMS handler role,” the blog post reads. “This technique allows it to bypass standard runtime permission prompts and gain access to sensitive data without raising alarms.”

It’s also been evolving quickly, Zimperium said, “adding new layers of obfuscation and packing to evade detection.”

Zimperium didn’t say who was behind the spyware. The Russian government is a cyberspace power, but typically hasn’t had to rely on spyware vendors, per se, as it has its own capabilities. Often — but not always — spyware linked to or suspected to be linked to the Kremlin is turned inwards, snooping on domestic targets.

“ClayRat is distributed through a highly orchestrated mix of social engineering and web-based deception, designed to exploit user trust and convenience,” according to Zimperium. “The campaign relies heavily on Telegram channels and phishing websites that impersonate well-known services and applications.”

ClayRat’s users also rely on phishing platforms.

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Three House Democrats questioned the Department of Homeland Security on Monday over a reported Immigration and Customs Enforcement contract with a spyware provider that they warn potentially “threatens Americans’ freedom of movement and freedom of speech.”

Their letter follows publication of a notice that ICE had lifted a stop-work order on a $2 million deal with Israeli spyware company Paragon Solutions, a contract that the Biden administration had frozen one year ago pending a review of its compliance with a spyware executive order.

Paragon is the maker of Graphite, and advertises it as having more safeguards than competitors that have received more public and legal scrutiny, such as NSO Group’s Pegasus, a claim researchers have challenged. A report earlier this year found suspected deployments of Graphite in countries across the globe, with targets including journalists and activists. WhatsApp also notified users this year about a Paragon-linked campaign targeting them. The tool can infect phones without its target having to click on any malicious lure, then mine data from them.

“Given the Trump Administration’s disregard for constitutional rights and civil liberties in pursuit of rapid mass deportation, we are seriously concerned that ICE will abuse Graphite software to target immigrants, people of color, and individuals who express opposition to ICE’s repeated attacks on the rule of law,” the three congressional Democrats, two of whom serve as ranking members of House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittees, wrote Monday.

The trio behind the letter are Reps. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, top Democrat on the Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement; Ohio Rep. Shontel Brown, ranking member of the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology and Government Innovation; and Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona.

Their letter pointed to two Supreme Court rulings — Riley v. California from 2014 and Carpenter v. United States from 2018 — that addressed warrantless surveillance of cellular data. “Allowing ICE to utilize spyware raises serious questions about whether ICE will respect Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless search and seizure for people residing in the U.S.,” the lawmakers wrote.

The trio also asked for communications and documents about ICE’s use of spyware, as well as legal discussions about ICE using spyware and its compliance with the 2023 Biden executive order. They also sought a list of data surveillance targets.

ICE’s surveillance tactics have long drawn attention, but they’ve gained more attention in the Trump administration, which has sought to vastly expand the agency. ICE has conducted raids that have often swept in U.S. citizens. Other federal contracting records have pointed to ICE’s intentions to develop a 24/7 social media surveillance regime.

DHS and ICE did not immediately answer requests for comment about the Democrats’ letter. ICE has not provided answers about the contract in other media inquiries. 

404 Media is suing for information about the ICE contract.

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Researchers have found two Android spyware families masquerading as messaging apps Signal and ToTok, apparently targeting residents of the United Arab Emirates.

ESET revealed the spyware campaigns Thursday in a blog post, saying that researchers discovered it in June but believe it dates back to last year. They dubbed the campaigns ProSpy and ToSpy, with the first impersonating both Signal and ToTok, and the second just ToTok.

ToTok has been effectively discontinued since 2020, after The New York Times reported that the app itself was a spying tool for the government of the UAE. The spyware was posing as an enhanced version of the app, ToTok Pro, ESET said.

Upon download, the spyware requests permission to access contacts, text messages and stored files, and once granted, it can start exfiltrating data, according to the researchers. That includes the data for which it sought permission, but also device information, audio, video, images and chat backups.

“Neither app containing the spyware was available in official app stores; both required manual installation from third-party websites posing as legitimate services,” said ESET researcher Lukáš Štefanko, who made the discovery. “Notably, one of the websites distributing the ToSpy malware family mimicked the Samsung Galaxy Store, luring users into manually downloading and installing a malicious version of the ToTok app.

“Confirmed detections in the UAE and the use of phishing and fake app stores suggest regionally focused operations with strategic delivery mechanisms,” he said.

It’s not the first time hackers have disguised malware in phony messaging apps. ESET shined a spotlight on the phenomenon last year, pointing to fake WhatsApp updates with mysterious intentions, copycat Telegram and WhatsApp websites for stealing cryptocurrency and a Chinese government-linked group seeking to distribute Android BadBazaar espionage code through authentic-looking Signal and Telegram apps.

ESET concluded that the latest spyware campaigns are likely targeting privacy-conscious UAE residents partly because the ToTok app was primarily used there and also because of a domain name ending in the substring “ae.net,” with “AE” being the two-letter country code for UAE.

“Given the app’s regional popularity and the impersonation tactics used by the threat actors, it is reasonable to speculate that the primary targets of this spyware campaign are users in the UAE or surrounding regions,” ESET wrote in its blog post.

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Reported by Meta and WhatsApp, the vulnerability leads to remote code execution and was likely exploited by a spyware vendor.

The post Samsung Patches Zero-Day Exploited Against Android Users appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Apple this year sent at least four rounds of notifications to French users potentially targeted by commercial spyware.

The post Apple Sends Fresh Wave of Spyware Notifications to French Users appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Apple’s new Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) brings always-on memory-safety protection covering key attack surfaces — including the kernel and over 70 userland processes.

The post Apple Unveils iPhone Memory Protections to Combat Sophisticated Attacks appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Apple has unveiled a comprehensive security system called Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) that represents a five-year engineering effort to combat sophisticated cyberattacks targeting individual users through memory corruption vulnerabilities.

The technology is built into Apple’s new iPhone 17 and iPhone Air devices, as well as the A19 and A19 Pro chips. It combines custom-designed hardware with changes to the operating system to deliver what Apple describes as “industry-first, always-on” memory safety protection. According to Apple’s security researchers, the system is primarily designed to defend against sophisticated attacks from so-called “mercenary spyware,” rather than from typical consumer malware.

“Based on our evaluations pitting Memory Integrity Enforcement against exceptionally sophisticated mercenary spyware attacks from the last three years, we believe MIE will make exploit chains significantly more expensive and difficult to develop and maintain, disrupt many of the most effective exploitation techniques from the last 25 years, and completely redefine the landscape of memory safety for Apple products,” the company wrote in a blog posted Tuesday. “Because of how dramatically it reduces an attacker’s ability to exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities on our devices, we believe Memory Integrity Enforcement represents the most significant upgrade to memory safety in the history of consumer operating systems.”

Memory corruption vulnerabilities have long accounted for some of the most pervasive threats to operating system security. These flaws happen when software doesn’t properly control how it reads from or writes to memory, allowing attackers to change, overwrite, or access parts of a computer’s memory they shouldn’t be able to.

Exploits targeting these flaws — in particular buffer overflows and use-after-free errors — have underpinned the sophisticated, multi-million-dollar exploit chain that powers spyware. Attackers exploit these flaws, often in “zero-click” (no user interaction required) scenarios, to run harmful code, steal data, or crash systems. For example, NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware was powered by three memory corruption vulnerabilities that were chained together. 

Recognizing this, Apple expanded efforts over the past five years to address memory safety “at scale.” The company worked closely with the chip designer Arm to improve a memory protection system where memory checks happen immediately, every single time memory is used, instead of sometimes waiting, which could leave a small window open for attackers. This led to the creation of Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE), a key part of Apple’s new system.

EMTE works by giving each piece of memory a special secret tag. Whenever the device tries to use a particular section of memory, the hardware checks the tag to make sure it is correct. If the tag doesn’t match what is expected, the device will immediately stop the program and record the incident. By ensuring every block of memory has its own unique tag, and by changing these tags whenever memory is reused, Apple’s system blocks unauthorized access efforts before they can cause damage.

“Apple has a deep understanding of this problem space, and because they control both the hardware (Apple Silicon) and the software (iOS), they have the unique ability to engineer a tightly integrated and very effective security mechanism,” said Patrick Wardle, co-founder and CEO of DoubleYou, a company that specializes in Apple security. “This kind of approach, which depends on tight coupling between the chip and the operating system, is something most other vendors cannot replicate as easily since they do not own both sides of the stack.”

The company acknowledges in a blog post that the system does not entirely eliminate spyware’s ability to be executed on an Apple device, but makes it extremely difficult for attacks to successfully run spyware or maintain access if a device has been compromised. 

“While there’s no such thing as perfect security, MIE is designed to dramatically constrain attackers and their degrees of freedom during exploitation,” the blog post reads. 

The efforts mirror similar systems put in place by Microsoft, which has a memory integrity feature in Windows 11, and Google, which has a similar system in its Pixel devices.

Natalia Krapiva, senior tech-legal counsel at Access Now, told CyberScoop she thought it was “great” that Apple was taking effective measures since it’s “always a cat-and-mouse” game when large tech companies create ways to thwart spyware developers.

“These spyware developers like finding new ways of targeting people, evading detection and so on,” Krapiva told CyberScoop. “This is great to see Apple coming up with new ways to protect high-risk users.

The one drawback Krapiva did highlight is that this system is only available on new devices. AccessNow works internationally with groups that are often targeted by spyware on devices that are several generations older than what most consumers use. 

“For our communities, oftentimes these are grassroots, independent media. It’s very hard to afford new devices, especially Apple devices,” she told CyberScoop. “It could be a nice thing for Apple to have some kind of a program to allow for these types of groups to be able to access this.”

MIE can also be taken advantage of by third-party applications, including social media and messaging applications. Additionally, EMTE is available to all Apple developers in Xcode, its developer toolkit, as part of the Enhanced Security feature it rolled out earlier this year. 

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Heather Doerges // My mom called the other day. It started out, “Honestly, your father.” Which, isn’t a strange way for her to start a conversation about my dad. “What […]

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