Lucian Constantin
CSO Senior Writer

Cisco patches permission hijacking issue in WebEx Meetings app for Android

news
Dec 2, 20151 min

The flaw made it possible for rogue apps to hijack the Cisco app's permissions

Cisco has fixed a vulnerability in its WebEx Meetings application for Android that allowed potentially rogue applications to hijack its permissions.

The issue, which affected all versions of the app older than 8.5.1, stemmed from the way custom application permissions were implemented and assigned at initialization time.

In addition to the default permissions defined by the OS, applications can declare and request custom permissions, a feature that the Android developers recommend be used only if absolutely necessary. It is also possible for apps to request to use custom permissions declared by another application.

An attacker could trick users to download a rogue application to their Android device and then use it to exploit the WebEx vulnerability to gain the same permissions, Cisco said in an advisory Tuesday.

Cico WebEx Meetings is a Web conferencing application that supports two-way video communications. Its permissions are extensive and include: access to find, add and remove accounts and contacts from the device; access to take pictures and record audio and access to read and modify the contents of the USB storage.

Users should make sure that they’re running Cisco WebEx Meetings 8.5.1 or newer. The latest version is available on Google Play.

Lucian Constantin

Lucian Constantin writes about information security, privacy, and data protection for CSO. Before joining CSO in 2019, Lucian was a freelance writer for VICE Motherboard, Security Boulevard, Forbes, and The New Stack. Earlier in his career, he was an information security correspondent for the IDG News Service and Information security news editor for Softpedia.

Before he became a journalist, Lucian worked as a system and network administrator. He enjoys attending security conferences and delving into interesting research papers. He lives and works in Romania.

You can reach him at lucian_constantin@foundryco.com or @lconstantin on X. For encrypted email, his PGP key's fingerprint is: 7A66 4901 5CDA 844E 8C6D 04D5 2BB4 6332 FC52 6D42

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