ALL ABOUT MOBILE PHONE PENETRATION TESTING IN 2021

In this section we will take brief look at the major threats which are present in current mobile devices with a focus on IOs and Android as these two accounts for 90% of the global mobile device market. This section will include the following topics: 

=> Mobile Phone attack victors. 

=> App stores 

=> Introduction to Android OS 

=> Introduction to Apple iOS 

=> Practical exercises about how to hack android devices 

1. Introduction 

The Current global estimate of mobile devices is around 14 billion, with an estimated 3.5 billion users. The number of devices is anticipated to increase to 16.8 billion by the year 2023 With the world growing ever dependent on mobile services such as online banking, social media, ecommerce and more, the amount of sensitive data being transmitted is truly staggering. This mobile revolution has resulted in mobile security becoming the new front line of cyber security. The concept of mobile security revolves around identifying the vulnerabilities within mobile devices, the possible ways these vulnerabilities can be exploited and how to protect against cybercriminals who may try to use these exploits. In this section we will take brief look at the major threats which are present in current mobile devices with a focus on IOs and Android as these two accounts for 90% of the global mobile device market. This section will include the following topics: 

=> Mobile Phone attack victors. 

=> App stores 

=> Introduction to Android OS 

=> Introduction to Apple iOS 

=> Practical exercises about how to hack android devices 

2. Mobile phone attack vectors

Attack Vector is a method or technique a hacker can to gain access to someone computer. computing device or network to inject a “bad code” often called payload. This vector helps hackers to exploit system vulnerabilities.

3. Outcomes of attack vectors 

=> Data Loss: stored data in the mobile phone is lost and taken by the attacker. 

=> Use of mobile resources: attacker may install a bot software to attack other networks such as launching DDOS attack using the victim mobile phone. 

=> Reputation loss: The attacker may use the victim social networks accounts such as twitter, Facebook, or victim email to send fake messages to the victim friends and business partners or send threats to others which might damage the victim reputation. 

=> Identity theft: the attacker may use the victim data found in the mobile phone such as victim photos, name, address, credit card to fake victim identity. 

4. Mobile phone attack lifecycle

The mobile phone attack lifecycle starts with the infection phase then installation of a backdoor and data exfiltration. 

Device Infection 

Device infection with spyware is performed differently for Android and iOS devices.

 => Android: Victims are tricked to download an APK file from a third-party source generally using social engineering attack, the android feature to allow “Install unknown apps” must be turned on for external APK files to be installed. The attacker tricks the victim by offering for free an application that is not free in the Google play store, giving victim instruction to allow APK from unknown sources. 

=> iOS: iOS infection requires physical access to the mobile. Infecting the device can also be through exploiting a zero-day such as the JailbreakME exploit. 

Backdoor Installation 

To install a backdoor requires administrator privileges by rooting Android devices and jailbreaking Apple devices. Despite device manufacturers placing rooting/jailbreaking detection mechanisms, mobile spyware can easily bypass them. 

=>Android: Rooting detection mechanisms do not apply to intentional rooting. 

=> iOS: The jailbreaking “community” is vociferous and motivated.

Data Exfiltration 

Spyware sends mobile content such as encrypted emails and messages to the attacker servers in plain text. It grabs the data at the point where the user pulls up data from the secure container to read it. 

5. App Stores 

Google (Play store) and Apple (AppStore) are a centralized marketplace for authenticated developers to show and sell their mobile applications. The mobile applications developed by developers are submitted to these marketplaces making them available to millions of mobile users. The attacker downloads a legitimate mobile app such as a game and repackages it with malware or backdoor and uploads the mobile apps to a third-party application store from where the end users download this malicious gaming application, believing it to be genuine. As a result, the malware gathers and sends user credentials such as call logs, photo, videos, and sensitive docs to the attacker without the user's knowledge. The backdoor will enable the attacker to upload more malicious software to victim machine and use it to attack other devices and networks. 

6. Introduction Android OS 

Android OS is developed by Google for mobile devices with processing capabilities for smartphones and tablets. Its kernel is based on Linux and installed applications run in a sandbox. 

Sandbox

Android provides layer of protection because it does not give one application access to the resource of another application. This is known as the ‘sandbox’ where every application plays in its own sandbox and cannot use another application’s resources, Android does this by giving each application a unique user id (UID), the application will be running as a separate process with that UID.This means that if an application attempts to do something it shouldn’t, like read the data from another application, or dial the phone (which is a separate application) then Android protects against this because the app doesn’t have the right privileges. Android antiviruses like Kaspersky, MacAfee, and AVG Technologies runs under sandbox also which lead to limit antivirus scanning environment. 

Permissions 

Because any world-accessible resources on the device. Such a limited application would not be remarkably interesting though, and Android can grant additional, fine-grained access rights to applications to allow for richer functionality. Permission can be enforced at different levels.

How android Antivirus software works 

The primary job of many Android antivirus applications is to scan for applications from unofficial third parties and check against a known list of compromised applications. This is highly dependent on the antivirus application having an updated list of compromised apps. Note that by default android devices does not allow installation of applications from unknown sources and the users must manually enable the device to allow installing application from unknown sources. Rooting android device is totally not recommended, and many android devices manufactures warn users if they root the device, they will lose device warranty. 

Google Play Protect 

Google Play Protect automatically scans all the apps on Android phones and works to prevent the installation of harmful apps, making it the most widely deployed mobile threat protection service in the world. 

Android Runtime ART

Android Runtime ART is a process virtual machine to isolate each running application in android from the OS kernel and from other running application, ART Replaced Dlavik virtual machine runtime since Android 5 (Lollipop).