Unpatched Address Bar Spoofing Flaw in UC Browser Exposes 600M Users to Phishing Attacks

An URL bar address spoofing vulnerability with the latest versions of UC Browser and UC Browser Mini exposes millions of users to Phishing Attacks.

The vulnerability was discovered by the security researcher Arif Khan, which allows an attacker to pose his phishing domain as the targeted site.

According to the researcher, the vulnerability exists only with the recent versions UC Browser 12.11.2.1184 and UC Browser Mini 12.10.1.1192, and older versions are not affected.

The vulnerability resides in the way how the browser user interface handles the request ” to display only the content or, data passed by the query parameter, an attacker can leverage this behavior to achieve URL Address Bar spoofing” which leads to a phishing attack.

No CVE identifier assigned for the vulnerability, by exploiting this vulnerability attacker can pose the malicious website as a legitimate site to the users, “a domain blogspot.com can pretend to be facebook.com, by simply making a user visit www.google.com.blogspot.com/?q=www.facebook.com”, reads vulnerability report.

“The fact that their regex rules just match the URL string, or, the URL any user is trying to visit a whitelist pattern but only check if the URL begins with a string like www.google.com can enable an attacker to bypass this regex check by simply using a subdomain on his domain like www.google.com.blogspot.com and attach the target domain name (which he wants to pose as) to the query portion of this subdomain like ?q=www.facebook.com.”

Arif published a PoC, shows the attack is nearly undetectable and easy to execute.

He reported the vulnerability to the UC Browser security team, and the issue was not yet addressed, they have set an Ignore status on the report.

Months before, a Potentially dangerous future in UC browser uncovered that puts Hundreds of millions of Android users under high risk that allows hackers to hijack Android devices via Man-in-the-Middle Attacks.

UC browsers is a most popular browser in Android platform with more than 500 million and UC Browser Mini has 100 million downloads from the Google Play store alone.

UC browser was designed by Chinese company UCWeb, which is owned by Alibaba Group, it is the fourth most popular browser following Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.

You can follow us on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook for daily Cybersecurity updates also you can take the Best Cybersecurity courses online to keep your self-updated.