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The Vulnerability Of The Media Server

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I. ATTACK METHOD The Stagefright vulnerabilities have been designated with seven Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure identifiers (CVE): CVE-2015-1538, CVE-2015-1539, CVE-2015-3824, CVE-2015-3826, CVE-2015-3827, CVE-2015-3828 and CVE-2015-3829. The Stagefright attacks utilize certain integer overflow vulnerabilities in one of Android’s core component called libStagefright. These attacks might use shellcode and disguise executable instructions as multimedia messages and send it to the victim’s phone number. The multimedia message received on the victim’s phone is automatically loaded with no input required from the user. Once the message is loaded, the malware code is executed. This gives the hacker control of the victim’s phone. As …show more content…

It also leaves the victim’s unaware that their devices have been compromised. Stagefright virus if developed, can have capability to spread like wildfire. Once a mobile is compromised using stagefright, its contacts can be accessed and virus can be sent in the form of MMS to all numbers in the contact list. As the MMS is received from a known person or friend, user opens it and phone might gets heacked. Thus it can be fast, self-propagating and devastating. The vulnerability created by Stagefright is ideal for cybercriminals. They can take advantage of this vulnerability to collectively spy on millions of people and also execute further malicious code. Hackers can steal personal information and can use it for a number of illegal activities. II. POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS 1. Joshua Drake from Zimperium released a script which he used for proving remote code execution exploiting Stagefright. This can tested on mobiles with Android versions prior to 5.0. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jduck/cve-2015-1538-1/master/Stagefright_CVE-2015-1538-1_Exploit.py This script only tests for one type of vulnerability – stsc and mp4 video format. Similarly scripts should be made for other types of vulnerabilities and other video and audio format files. Such scripts should be used in research in Universities and many vulnerabilities can be found and reported to Google. 2. Auto-download should be removed from messengers or applications like Hangouts,

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