Pwning Androids, iPhones with Exchange

By

Wipe phones, steal data and cause mayhem with ActiveSync.

An attacker can steal your contacts, snoop on your email and erase all data from your iPhone or Android using Microsoft Exchange, a Perth university lecturer has revealed.

Pwning Androids, iPhones with Exchange

Peter Hannay discovered that by pushing policy to phones he could wipe the devices clean and likely steal data and sniff outgoing emails.

“There is nothing technically difficult to this – it's really easy and really lame, and that's a problem,” the Edith Cowan researcher told delegates at the Kiwicon security conference. 

Kiwicon 6 coverage

“We can set a minimum length for device passwords, demand as the server that a 65,500-long character password be set … and set the screen lock to a one second timeout and give one password attempt.”

“And we pushed a WiFi [ban] out to a WiFi-only iPad.”

In a proof-of-concept demonstration also shown at Defcon, Hannay used a WiFi Pineapple with DNS spoofing plus a fake certificate to which victim phones would connect.

Victim iPhones would flag a connection warning of which “nine out of 10 CEOs will click through” before the devices would be wiped.

“The problem is that we are giving users ... the ability to turn off security measures and they have been trained for years to bypass these sorts of errors,” Hannay said.

Microsoft's Windows Phone was not vulnerable to the attack.

Hannay along with a crew of Edith Cowan university students were further developing the research to include a protocol library to emulate the ActiveSync Protocol. 

“We may be able to get the phones to sync address books, contacts and so on. We could … push a new outgoing mail server to devices so that from now on whenever you send an email, it comes through us.”

He said the attack would gather a lot of victims in public areas such as airports.

Hannay also said when analysing a recent iteration of Android, he discovered Google Apps for business could also push policies following fallible reverse DNS checks.

Got a news tip for our journalists? Share it with us anonymously here.

Copyright © SC Magazine, Australia

Tags:

Most Read Articles

CBA using facial recognition logins to verify disputed payments

CBA using facial recognition logins to verify disputed payments

Qantas contacted by "potential cyber criminal"

Qantas contacted by "potential cyber criminal"

SA Power Networks tackles IAM, cloud security under five-year strategy

SA Power Networks tackles IAM, cloud security under five-year strategy

Qantas facing 'significant' data theft after cyber attack

Qantas facing 'significant' data theft after cyber attack

Log In

  |  Forgot your password?