The experts of Kaspersky Lab have recently proclaimed regarding the targeted attacks that are specifically using the zero-day vulnerabilities in Google Chrome and Microsoft Windows.
According to the report, the vulnerabilities have been fixed this week as a segment of Patch Tuesday. However, this chain of Zero-day vulnerabilities is attacking the Google Chrome browser, as well as the Windows 10 to compromise different companies around the world.
Initially, the very first attack of the zero-day vulnerability has been discovered in mid-April 2021, and the operator of this campaign is a new group called PuzzleMaker.
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RCE & Elevation of Privilege Exploit
All the attacks have been conducted via Chrome browser, not only this but the experts also asserted that Google chrome web browser has been also targetted in the computer hacking contest named Pwn2Own competition on April 6-8, 2021.
However, the experts have disclosed some information of the vulnerability in ntoskrnl.exe and named it CVE-2021-31955. This particular vulnerability has been affiliated along with Windows OS features known as SuperFetch.
The main motive of this feature is to lessen software loading times just by pre-loading all the frequently used applications into memory, and this feature was initially introduced in Window Vista.
In 2021 Six Chrome Zero-days exploited in the wild
There are a total of six vulnerabilities that are exploited in the wild in 2021, among them, the sixth one is the CVE-2021-30551, and this sixth one is also a zero-day vulnerability that has been fixed.
Sergei Glazunov of Google Project Zero has initially discovered the vulnerability CVE-2021-30551, apart from this Google Chrome has fixed other five vulnerability that are mentioned below:-
- CVE-2021-21148 – February 4th, 2021
- CVE-2021-21166 – March 2nd, 2021
- CVE-2021-21193 – March 12th, 2021
- CVE-2021-21220 – April 13th, 2021
- CVE-2021-21224 – April 20th, 2021
Malware modules
The cybersecurity researchers at Kaspersky Lab reported that apart from the exploits, there are four malware modules that have been used in this attack chain, and here we have mentioned them below:-
- Stager
- Dropper
- Service
- Remote shell
Once the vulnerabilities were exploited in Chrome and Windows, soon after the threat actors initiate a download from a remote server and execute a more composite dropper.
Here, the main motive of this dropper is to install two executable files that are disguised as legitimate Windows files.
However, on April 13, 2021, Google published Chrome update 89.0.4389.128 for Windows, Mac, and Linux; and this update also consists of a fix for two vulnerabilities, which also include the vulnerability that was detected during the Pwn2Own contest.
