Sophisticated Hacks Against Android, Windows Reveals Zero-Day Trove

Google researchers have detailed a major hacking campaign that was detected in early 2020, which mounted a series of sophisticated attacks, some using zero-day flaws, against Windows and Android platforms. Working together, researchers from Google Project Zero and the Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) uncovered the attacks, which were “performed by a highly sophisticated actor,” Ryan from Project Zero wrote in the first of a six-part blog series on their research. “We discovered two exploit servers delivering different exploit chains via watering-hole attacks,” he wrote. “One server targeted Windows users, the other targeted Android.” Watering-hole attacks target organizations’ oft-used websites and inject them with malware, infecting and gaining access to victims’ machines when users visit the infected sites. In the case of the attacks that Google researchers uncovered, attackers executed the malicious code remotely on both the Windows and Android servers using Chrome exploits. The exploits used against Windows included zero-day flaws, while Android users were targeted with exploit chains using known “n-day” exploits, though they acknowledge it’s possible zero-day vulnerabilities could also have been used, researchers said. The team spent months analyzing the attacks, including examining what happened post-exploitation on Android devices. In that case, additional payloads were delivered that collected device fingerprinting information, location data, a list of running…

Source