In the last couple of months, the press has been full of headlines about the dangers of Apple devices, government agencies and major corporations are racing to prohibit employees from using personal iPhones and iPads for work purposes. However, they are not offering anything in return except for the independent purchase of Chinese smartphones with Android.
Until recently, no one tried hong kong whatsapp resource to limit the use of foreign smartphones; all nine years of import substitution were marked by the replacement of desktop and server operating systems, DBMS, and various business applications. Smartphones also remained outside the regulation of critical information infrastructure. For some reason, it never occurred to anyone that an employee with a device connected to an American cloud could also pose a threat to critical information infrastructure facilities. The transition to Russian mobile devices with domestic OSs has so far been, to put it mildly, episodic.
Everything changed on June 1, 2023, when the Russian FSB, without any technical details,posted a messageabout the discovery of an intelligence operation by American intelligence agencies using Apple mobile devices. This news instantly became a sensation and was reprinted by all Russian publications. By a strange coincidence, on the same day, Kaspersky Labpublished newsabout the discovery of a new type of targeted attack on iOS devices of the "zero click" category, in which no user action is required and the infection occurs covertly. Detailed technical information about the infection method via iMessage called "Operation Triangulation" is also availablewas publishedin the "LK" blog, where it was noted that infections could have occurred as early as 2019. We do not know for sure whether these two events are connected, but the description of the "Triangulation" malware very accurately corresponds to the tasks of a targeted reconnaissance operation using so-called zero-day vulnerabilities. "Zero-day" vulnerabilities are vulnerabilities previously unknown to the software developer and the information security research community that can be used by attackers (both organized groups of hackers and intelligence agencies) to organize covert cyberattacks over a fairly long period of time.
In Russia, after this news, a wave of bans on the use of Apple mobile devices began. It seemed that the finest hour had come for Russian smartphones and tablets with domestic mobile operating systems. But it turned out that when banning Apple devices, as a rule, employees are advised to switch to devices with Google Android. Such a recommendation looks, to put it mildly, unprofessional, moreover, it creates threats that are several times more significant than continuing to use Apple smartphones. Firstly, the Android OS also belongs to an American corporation, and if we do not trust Apple, then why should we trust Google? Secondly, the features of the architecture, distribution model and updates of Android make this mobile OS much more dangerous and vulnerable compared to iOS. Of course, the ostrich can hide its head in the sand, but the lion will not disappear from this.
To understand why the mass transition from Apple iOS to Google Android is beneficial, first of all, to attackers (whether hackers or intelligence agencies), we need to understand the following questions:
How does the update distribution system work in iOS and Android?
How much telemetry and personal data do Apple devices and Android smartphones, especially those made in China, collect?
Is the attack discovered on June 1 really fundamentally new?
How many more attack vectors does Android have compared to iOS?