![]() Even those programs, however, can cost you valuable time and computing resources. Many spyware programs are more annoying than dangerous, serving up pop-up ads or gathering e-mail addresses for use in spam campaigns. That information may include surfing habits, system details or, in its most dangerous form, passwords and login information for critical applications such as online banking. Spyware is software that resides on a computer and sends information to its creator. The IOCs are available in the SentinelOne OSAMiner report, here. “In this case, we have not seen the actor use any of the more powerful features of AppleScript that we’ve discussed elsewhere, but that is an attack vector that remains wide open and which many defensive tools are not equipped to handle.” “Run-only AppleScripts are surprisingly rare in the macOS malware world, but both the longevity of and the lack of attention to the macOS.OSAMiner campaign, which has likely been running for at least 5 years, shows exactly how powerful run-only AppleScripts can be for evasion and anti-analysis,” Stokes concluded in his report yesterday. Stokes and the SentinelOne team hope that by finally cracking the mystery surrounding this campaign and by publishing IOCs, other macOS security software providers would now be able to detect OSAMiner attacks and help protect macOS users. #MALWARE YEARS USED RUNONLY AVOID FIVE CODE# Yesterday, Stokes published the full-chain of this attack, along with indicators of compromise (IOCs) of past and newer OSAMiner campaigns. #MALWARE YEARS USED RUNONLY AVOID FIVE DOWNLOAD# Since “run-only” AppleScript come in a compiled state where the source code isn’t human-readable, this made analysis harder for security researchers. The primary reason was that security researchers weren’t able to retrieve the malware’s entire code at the time, which used nested run-only AppleScript files to retrieve its malicious code across different stages.Īs users installed the pirated software, the boobytrapped installers would download and run a run-only AppleScript, which would download and run a second run-only AppleScript, and then another final third run-only AppleScript. ![]() YEARS RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS AVOID DETECTION FOR CODE ![]() SentinelOne said that two Chinese security firms spotted and analyzed older versions of the OSAMiner in August and September 2018, respectively.īut their reports only scratched the surface of what OSAMiner was capable of, SentinelOne macOS malware researcher Phil Stokes said yesterday. Nested run-only AppleScripts, for the win!īut the cryptominer did not go entirely unnoticed. “From what data we have it appears to be mostly targeted at Chineses/Asia-Pacific communities,” the spokesperson added. “OSAMiner has been active for a long time and has evolved in recent months,” a SentinelOne spokesperson told ZDNet in an email interview on Monday. Named OSAMiner, the malware has been distributed in the wild since at least 2015 disguised in pirated (cracked) games and software such as League of Legends and Microsoft Office for Mac, security firm SentinelOne said in a report published this week. YEARS RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS AVOID DETECTION FOR SOFTWARE For more than five years, macOS users have been the targets of a sneaky malware operation that used a clever trick to avoid detection and hijacked the hardware resources of infected users to mine cryptocurrency behind their backs.When we think about security on macOS and the tools used by offensive actors, whether those are real in the wild attacks or red team exercises, we tend to think of things like python scripts, shell scripts, malicious documents, shady extensions and of course, the fake, doctored or trojan application bundle. There is much less attention in the security field on AppleScript – a built-in macOS technology – despite the fact it’s been around for as long as Python and predates macOS 10 itself by 8 or 9 years.Īs I’ll show in this post, AppleScript is widely used by offensive actors. ![]() This includes its use in adware, its use for tasks such as persistence, anti-analysis, browser hijacking, spoofing and more. Why Have the Good Guys Ignored AppleScript? Worryingly, given the lack of attention paid to AppleScript in the research community, that is all without even leveraging some of AppleScript’s most powerful or unique features, some of which we’ll cover below (others I’ve written about before here). YEARS RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS AVOID DETECTION FOR FREE.YEARS RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS AVOID DETECTION FOR CODE.YEARS RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS AVOID DETECTION FOR SOFTWARE. ![]()
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