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- #MACOS MALWARE YEARS RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS DETECTION FULL#
- #MACOS MALWARE YEARS RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS DETECTION SOFTWARE#
- #MACOS MALWARE YEARS RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS DETECTION CODE#
The hope for this team of researchers is that they can crack the mystery around this clever malware. Phil Stokes, a macOS malware researcher at SentinelOne, published the attack’s full-chain with past and present OSAMiner campaigns and IOCs (Indicators of Compromise).
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#MACOS MALWARE YEARS RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS DETECTION CODE#
It would then download and run a second run-only AppleScript and then run another third/final one.īecause the run-only AppleScript is received in a compiled state (the source code is not readable by humans), security researchers’ analysis was not easy. When the users installed their pirated software, the disguised installers would download and run a run-only AppleScript. It used nested run-only AppleScript files to retrieve its malicious code across different stages at the time.
#MACOS MALWARE YEARS RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS DETECTION FULL#
The reason was that the researchers were unable to retrieve the malware’s full code. However, the reports written after this were not very detailed and did not capture the full extent of OSAMiner’s capabilities. Back in 2018 August and September, two Chinese security firms analyzed an older version of the Malware. However, the crypto miner did not completely avoid detection. Not too invisibleįrom the data collected, it seems that it attacked people in Chinese and Asian Pacific communities mostly. OSAMiner has been active for a while and has evolved in recent times, according to a SentinelOne spokesperson. According to SentinelOne, a security firm, which published a report this week.
#MACOS MALWARE YEARS RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS DETECTION SOFTWARE#
It is disguised in pirated (cracked) games and software like League of Legends and Microsoft Office for Mac. The malware has been distributed in the wild since at least 2015 and has been named OSAMiner. This article continues to discuss new techniques used by the updated version of OSAMiner to prevent detection and other reports of attacks targeting macOS devices to plant cryptominers.In the last five years (perhaps more), macOS users have been targeted by a sneaky malware operation, which used a clever trick, making it virtually invisible, while hijacking hardware resources on infected machines to mine cryptocurrency. These methods include a script to ensure the parent script's persistence, a parent script to kill running processes in a device, an anti-analysis AppleScript to perform tasks in support of evasion, a script that downloads the XMR-STAK-RX RandomX miner, and more. The researchers discovered that the malware uses multiple methods to execute the run-only AppleScript. In order to decompile the malware scripts, the researchers used a lesser-known AppleScript-dissembler project and a custom tool developed by Sentinel labs. OSAMiner uses run-only AppleScripts to make it more difficult for its code to be reverse-engineered. This malware now uses multiple versions of AppleScript, a scripting language used to automate macOS actions, to improve obfuscation.
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The latest version of OSAMiner uses new techniques to evade detection. According to Sentinel Labs, OSAMiner has been active since 2015, spreading through compromised video games like League of Legends, and hacked versions of software packages such as Microsoft Office for macOS. Researchers at Sentinel Labs have identified an updated version of OSAMiner, the cryptominer that targets the Mac operating system to mine Monero.