Researchers have discovered multiple zero-day bugs in Safari, Chrome, and IE browsers that are under attack. Of these, the Safari WebKit zero-day also triggered the LinkedIn phishing campaign again EU government officials.
Zero-Day Bugs In Safari, Chrome, and IE
According to a recent post from Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG), they have found numerous zero-day vulnerabilities under attack.
As observed, these four bugs were exploited in three different malicious campaigns.
Specifically, they found four different zero-day bugs, of which two affected Google Chrome, one affected Internet Explorer, and Safari WebKit.
The zero-day bugs in Chrome include CVE-2021-21166 and CVE-2021-30551, which the attackers used to target users with email phishing. The campaign predominantly targeted users in Armenia, aiming to collect their device fingerprints.
From these two, the bug CVE-2021-21166 also affected the WebKit code, and hence, made Safari users vulnerable as well. However, the researchers only detected its active exploitation against Chrome users.
Regarding Safari, the vulnerability CVE-2021-1879 existed in the WebKit that the threat actors exploited to executed LinkedIn phishing. The attackers precisely sent phishing links to the target government officials from western European countries via LinkedIn Messaging. The attack would execute if the victim visited the phishing link via an iOS device running on versions 12.4 through 13.7.
The last zero-day vulnerability CVE-2021-33742 affected Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Despite reaching its end-of-life, the browser still attracts threat actors as it exists on many Windows machines, including the older and vulnerable ones. The threat actors used to fingerprint the target device before delivering the final payload to exploit the flaw.
In fact, the exploitation of the IE zero-day looks similar to the ones of Chrome. Also, the researchers found the same vendor selling the three exploits – the Israel-based spyware firm Candiru.
Patches Deployed
Upon discovering the bugs, the researchers reported the matter to the respective vendors.
Consequently, all of these bugs have received fixes already.
What remains important is for users to ensure their devices are updated with the latest patches to stay safe.