A group of ethical hackers cracked open Apple’s infrastructure and systems and, over the course of three months, discovered 55 vulnerabilities, a number of which would have given attackers complete control over customer and employee applications.
Of note, a critical, wormable iCloud account takeover bug would allow attackers to automatically steal all of a victim’s documents, photos, videos and more.
The discovery by hackers Sam Curry, Brett Buerhaus, Ben Sadeghipour, Samuel Erb and Tanner Barnes demonstrated key weaknesses in the company’s “massive” infrastructure while it also earned the team nearly $300,000 to date in rewards for their efforts, Curry wrote in an extensive blog post detailing the team’s findings.
Among the flaws found in core portions of Apple’s infrastructure includes ones that would have allowed an attacker to: “fully compromise both customer and employee applications; launch a worm capable of automatically taking over a victim’s iCloud account; retrieve source code for internal Apple projects; fully compromise an industrial control warehouse software used by Apple; and take over the sessions of Apple employees with the capability of accessing management tools and sensitive resources,” he wrote.
Of the 55 vulnerabilities discovered, 11 were rated with critical severity, 29 with high severity, 13 with medium severity and two with low severity. Researchers rated the bugs based on the CvSS vulnerability-severity rating, and “our understanding of the business-related impact,” Curry said.
The wormable iCloud bug is a cross-site scripting (XSS) issue, according to the writeup. iCloud is an automatic storage mechanism for photos, videos, documents, and app related data for Apple products. Additionally, this platform provides services like Mail and Find my iPhone.
“The mail service is a full email platform where users can send and receive emails similar to Gmail and Yahoo,” explained Curry. “Additionally, there is a mail app on both iOS and Mac which is installed by default on the products. The mail service is hosted on www.icloud.com alongside all of the other services like file and document storage.”
He added, “This meant, from an attackers perspective, that any cross-site scripting vulnerability would allow an attacker to retrieve whatever information they wanted to from the iCloud service.”
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