Book Image

Mobile Device Exploitation Cookbook

By : Akshay Dixit
Book Image

Mobile Device Exploitation Cookbook

By: Akshay Dixit

Overview of this book

Mobile attacks are on the rise. We are adapting ourselves to new and improved smartphones, gadgets, and their accessories, and with this network of smart things, come bigger risks. Threat exposure increases and the possibility of data losses increase. Exploitations of mobile devices are significant sources of such attacks. Mobile devices come with different platforms, such as Android and iOS. Each platform has its own feature-set, programming language, and a different set of tools. This means that each platform has different exploitation tricks, different malware, and requires a unique approach in regards to forensics or penetration testing. Device exploitation is a broad subject which is widely discussed, equally explored by both Whitehats and Blackhats. This cookbook recipes take you through a wide variety of exploitation techniques across popular mobile platforms. The journey starts with an introduction to basic exploits on mobile platforms and reverse engineering for Android and iOS platforms. Setup and use Android and iOS SDKs and the Pentesting environment. Understand more about basic malware attacks and learn how the malware are coded. Further, perform security testing of Android and iOS applications and audit mobile applications via static and dynamic analysis. Moving further, you'll get introduced to mobile device forensics. Attack mobile application traffic and overcome SSL, before moving on to penetration testing and exploitation. The book concludes with the basics of platforms and exploit tricks on BlackBerry and Windows Phone. By the end of the book, you will be able to use variety of exploitation techniques across popular mobile platforms with stress on Android and iOS.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
Mobile Device Exploitation Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Analyzing malware in the iOS environment


We will take a look at the XSSer mRAT iOS malware sample, for our preliminary analysis. If installed, this malware operates in the background of a victim's phone, and the contents of the targeted device are sent to remote servers that appear to be controlled by a foreign government or organization. XSSer mRAT can steal SMS messages, call logs, location data, photos, address books, data from the Chinese messaging application Tencent, and passwords from the iOS keychain.

Getting ready

We need unzipping utilities such as 7-Zip, WinZip, and so on.

How to do it...

To analyze malware in the iOS environment perform the following steps:

  1. We unpack the .deb file to view the contents of the package. The unpacked directory contains a file called data.tar, which can be further unpacked to the data directory.

  2. We now explore further, to /data/bin, where we find three files:

    • com.xsser.0day.iphone.plist

    • xsser.0day_t

    • xsser.0day_t.sh

  3. Let's have a look at the xxser.0day_t.sh file...