Metasploit 3.7 Hacks Apple iOS

An anonymous reader writes "HD Moore is at it again. This time the famous open source security researcher has set his sights on exploiting Apple iOS. The Metasploit 3.7 release includes 35 new attack modules in total."

Sites, Sights

[mikael_j]

"Set his sites"? really?

Not an iOS Exploit In And Of Itself

[rsmith-mac]

The Apple iOS Backup File Extraction module however is not an attack vector for directly exploiting iOS. Rather it is what is known as a post-exploitation module.

"The post-exploitation modules (post for short) are designed to run on systems that were compromised through another vector, whether its social engineering, a guessed password, or an unpatched vulnerability," HD Moore, Rapid7 chief security officer and Metasploit chief architect told InternetNews.com. "This module requires iTunes to be installed and for a backend to be accessible that has not been encrypted."

If I'm reading this right, the "exploit" is that Metasploit can now read unencrypted backups. I'm not sure how this is an exploit (the backup DB format isn't much of a secret), but there you go.

If you want a real exploit, look into the "i0n1c" exploit being used to jailbreak phones on the latest OS.

Re:It's time

[mjwx]

Because Apple hasn't attracted any interest in the past few years during its moderate rise in popularity?

There, fixed that for you. Apple's have only gotten out of the 2% of computers in the last 2 or 3 years. Even now they struggle to get 5% worldwide.

Now back onto topic, as a clued in /.er will always point out, malware is a business and business take a long time to react to changes in the marketplace. Malware attacks on phones are new, very new as there was
A) Never a market for phone malware.
B) Phones were never powerful enough to be useful.
C) Too many different types of phones to make any attack worthwhile. Cost would have been way too high to get every single Symbian model out there.

Take note of the last one. IOS drops that cost a lot, making malware on phones economically viable. Further more, IOS has proven itself to be quite vulnerable in the past, you do know that jailbreaking is done by exploiting a vulnerability dont you. Feel free to use the "jailbreak me" PDF vulnerability as an example. The only reason it hasn't been exploited is because there's more profit in Windows malware.

Claiming you are automagically protected when you've never even been attacked is naive at best. It's like Lisa's (Simpson) tiger repelling rock, you cant use the fact that there are no tigers around the rock as proof of it's tiger repelling abilities.