McAfee Labs finds mobile apps left vulnerable for months

McAfee Labs researchers found that mobile app providers have been slow to address the most basic SSL vulnerabilities: improper digital certificate chain validation. In September 2014, the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) at Carnegie Mellon University released a list of mobile apps possessing this weakness, including apps with millions of downloads to their credit.

In January, McAfee Labs tested the 25 most popular apps on CERT’s list of vulnerable mobile apps that send login credentials through insecure connections and found that 18 still have not been patched despite public disclosure, vendor notification, and, in some cases, multiple version updates addressing concerns other than security. McAfee Labs researchers simulated man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks that successfully intercepted information shared during supposedly secure SSL sessions. The vulnerable data included usernames and passwords and in some instances, login credentials from social networks and other third party services.
Although there is no evidence that these mobile apps have been exploited, the cumulative number of downloads for these apps ranges into the hundreds of millions. Given these numbers, McAfee Labs’ findings suggest that the choice by mobile app developers to not patch the SSL vulnerabilities has potentially put millions of users at risk of becoming targets of MITM attacks.

“Our reliance on mobile devices has been continually increasing over the past few years, with them and the applications that run on them now essential tools for both consumers and businesses” said Raj Samani, EMEA CTO for Intel Security “With this in mind, it is therefore important that mobile apps have the level of protection required for consumers and businesses to use them safely and so mobile app developers must take responsibility for ensuring that their applications follow secure programing and vulnerability responses”

Another Q4 development followed closely by McAfee Labs was the rise of the Angler exploit kit – one of the cybercrime-as-a-service economy’s latest contributions to off-the-shelf tools delivering ever greater malicious functionality. Researchers saw cybercriminals migrate to Angler in the second half of 2014, when it surpassed Blacole in popularity among exploit kits. Angler employs a variety of evasion techniques to remain undetected by virtual machines, sandboxes, and security software, and frequently changes patterns and payloads to hide its presence from some security products.

This crimeware package contains easy-to-use attack features and new capabilities such as file-less infection, virtual machine and security product evasion, and the ability to deliver a wide range of payloads including banking Trojans, rootkits, ransomware, CryptoLocker, and backdoor Trojans.

The report also identified a number of other developments in the final quarter of 2014:
· Mobile Malware. McAfee Labs reported that mobile malware samples grew 14 percent during the fourth quarter of 2014, with Asia and Africa registering the highest infection rates. At least 8 percent of all McAfee-monitored mobile systems reported an infection in Q4 2014, with much of the activity being attributed to the AirPush ad network.
· Potentially Unwanted Programs. In Q4, McAfee Labs detected PUPs on 91 million systems each day. McAfee Labs sees PUPs becoming more and more aggressive, posing as legitimate apps while performing unauthorised actions such as displaying unintended ads, modifying browser settings, or collecting user and system data.
· Ransomware. Beginning in Q3, the number of new ransomware samples began to grow again after a four-quarter decline. In Q4, the number of new samples grew 155 percent.
· Signed Malware. After a brief drop in new malicious signed binaries, the pace of growth resumed in Q4 with a 17 percent increase in total signed binaries.
· Total Malware. McAfee Labs now detects 387 new samples of malware every minute, or more than six every second.