Cyber Risks · Cisco Talos

Vulnerability Spotlight: Blue Stacks App Player Privilege Escalation

Summary: Cisco Talos disclosed CVE-2016-4288 (TALOS-2016-0124), a privilege escalation flaw in BlueStacks App Player where the 'Users' group has full access to the BlueStacks registry key holding the 'InstallDir' value. Because the BlueStacks service reads that value and runs HD-Network.exe from the location it specifies, a user can point InstallDir at a chosen file and execute it with SYSTEM rights; Talos reported the issue on 2016-04-13 and it was patched on 2016-08-04.

Key Takeaway: Any local user on a machine running BlueStacks could rewrite one registry value and run their own executable as SYSTEM, and Talos released no detection rules because the attack involves no network traffic for monitoring to catch.

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Topics
Vulnerabilities & Patching
Mentions
CVE-2016-4288
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