#MACOS MALWARE YEARS RUNONLY AVOID FIVE MAC OS#
#MACOS MALWARE YEARS RUNONLY AVOID FIVE SOFTWARE#

'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.

#MACOS MALWARE YEARS RUNONLY AVOID FIVE SOFTWARE#

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. Yesterday, Stokes published the full-chain of this attack, along with indicators of compromise (IOCs) of past and newer OSAMiner campaigns. Since 'run-only' AppleScript come in a compiled state where the source code isn't human-readable, this made analysis harder for security researchers. For more than five years, macOS users have been the targets of a sneaky malware. 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. macOS malware used run-only AppleScripts to avoid detection for five years. The miner setup script also uses the built-in caffeinate tool to prevent the Mac sleeping and also does some evasion checks.

#MACOS MALWARE YEARS RUNONLY AVOID FIVE MAC OS#

party developers such as anti-virus vendors on Mac OS X, an approach also. Hopefully, analysts can use the research done in this campaign to help prevent future run-only. Forty-five years of research have explored these and other concepts in great. As 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. macOS malware used run-only AppleScripts to avoid detection for five years. The macOS.OSAMiner has been active since 2015, primarily infecting users in Asia. Case-in-point being the macOS.OSAMiner campaign, which took at least five years to crack open.

Macos malware years runonly avoid five