![]() ![]() That makes the job of security professionals attempting to analyze the code in order to better understand it, an extremely challenging proposition. OASMiner's latest capabilities have seen it begin to export payloads as run-only AppleScript files, which makes decompiling them a daunting proposition. Its most recent update has made it a nasty piece of work indeed. OSAMiner has been seen in the wilds and in use by hackers since at least 2015, but the group that controls the code has taken pains to keep the malware relevant by making regular updates. The most recently discovered variant of a MacOS-specific malware dubbed OSAMiner is an excellent example of that. Given that change, the company's products are now regularly targeted by hackers around the world. Times have changed, and Apple is now one of the dominant forces in tech. Hackers didn't bother targeting them because there was so much low hanging fruit in the Windows market. 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.There was a time when Apple was a niche player in the technology market.Īs such, one thing Apple users could count on was the fact that they didn't have to worry much about viruses or malware. 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. “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. “From what data we have it appears to be mostly targeted at Chineses/Asia-Pacific communities,” the spokesperson added. Nested run-only AppleScripts, for the win!īut the cryptominer did not go entirely unnoticed. 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. 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. ![]() Since “run-only” AppleScript come in a compiled state where the source code isn’t human-readable, this made analysis harder for security researchers. #MACOS MALWARE YEARS RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS TO CODE# Yesterday, Stokes published the full-chain of this attack, along with indicators of compromise (IOCs) of past and newer OSAMiner campaigns. An effort to reverse-engineer malicious AppleScript has led to the creation of a tool to analyze run-only malware targeting the Mac operating system, undermining a common. 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. #MACOS MALWARE YEARS RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS TO SOFTWARE# “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. The IOCs are available in the SentinelOne OSAMiner report, here. #MACOS MALWARE YEARS RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS TO CODE#.#MACOS MALWARE YEARS RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS TO SOFTWARE#. ![]()
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