In November 2019, Kaspersky technologies successfully detected a Google Chrome 0-day exploit that was used in Operation WizardOpium attacks. During our investigation, we discovered that yet another 0-day exploit was used in those attacks. The exploit for Google Chrome embeds a 0-day EoP exploit (CVE-2019-1458) that is used to gain higher privileges on the infected machine as well as escaping the Chrome process sandbox. The exploit is very similar to those developed by the prolific 0-day developer known as ‘Volodya’.
The EoP exploit consists of two stages: a tiny PE loader and the actual exploit. After achieving a read/write primitive in the renderer process of the browser through vulnerable JS code, the PE exploit corrupts some pointers in memory to redirect code execution to the PE loader. This is done to bypass sandbox restrictions because the PE exploit cannot simply start a new process using native WinAPI functions.
The PE loader locates an embedded DLL file with the actual exploit and repeats the same process as the native Windows PE loader – parsing PE headers, handling imports/exports, etc. After that, a code execution is redirected to the entry point of the DLL – the DllEntryPoint function. The PE code then creates a new thread, which is an entry point for the exploit itself, and the main thread simply waits until it stops.
EoP exploit used in the attack
The PE file encapsulating this EoP exploit has the following header:
< ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
