Windows 0 - Day Exploit CVE-2019-1458 widly used by Hackers in Operation WizardOpium Cyber Attacks

Researchers discovered a newly patched Windows Zero-day vulnerability exploit already used in Operation WizardOpium attacks along with Chrome Zero-day exploit in last month.

The attack was initially observed by Kaspersky researchers who have already uncovered a Google Chrome 0-day exploit that was used in the part of the attack.

Further detailed investigation revealed that 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 and also escape the Chrome process sandbox.

Researchers observed the 2 different stages in EoP exploit, one is a tiny PE loader and another one is an actual exploit. Kaspersky products detect this exploit with the verdict PDM: Exploit.Win32.Generic.

EoP exploit indicates that the vulnerability it used belongs to the win32k.sys driver and that the EoP exploit was the 0-day exploit, and it was confirmed by the researchers when they have tested with an exploit against the latest (patched) versions of Windows 7 and even on a few builds of Windows 10.

Exploit Chrome and Bypass Sandbox Restriction

To bypass the Chrome sandbox restriction, attackers using vulnerable Javascript to achieving a read/write primitive in the renderer process of the browser to corrupts some pointers in memory to redirect code execution to the PE loader using PE exploit.

Later PE loader tries to locate the embedded DLL file in the Exploit, and continue the same process such as parsing PE headers, handling imports/exports and more.

Later the code execution process will be redirected to the entry point of the DLL ( 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 (Credits: Kaspersky)

According to Kaspersky's research ” The vulnerability itself is related to windows switching functionality (for example, the one triggered using the Alt-Tab key combination). That’s why the exploit’s code uses a few WinAPI calls (GetKeyState/SetKeyState) to emulate a keypress operation.”

Details about how Exploit gets an arbitrary kernel read/write primitive is explained here. Once it obtained, then used to perform privilege escalation on the target system.