Not to mention: What everyone really wants. What’s the craic? Ionut Ilascu reports- Mac malware uses 'run-only' AppleScripts to evade analysis: A cryptocurrency mining campaign … is using malware that has evolved into a complex variant giving researchers a lot of trouble analyzing it. has been in the wild since at least 2015. Yet analyzing it is difficult because … it embeds a run-only AppleScript into another script and uses URLs in public web pages to download the actual … payloads. Run-only AppleScript … makes decompiling them into source code a tall order. … Security researchers at SentinelOne … were able to reverse engineer some samples they collected by using a lesser-known AppleScript disassembler (Jinmo’s applescript-disassembler) and a decompiler tool developed internally.Īnd Catalin Cimpanu adds- macOS malware used run-only AppleScripts to avoid detection for five years: A sneaky malware operation … used a clever trick to avoid detection and hijacked the hardware resources of infected users to mine cryptocurrency behind their backs. Named OSAMiner, the malware has been distributed in the wild since at least 2015. "OSAMiner has been active for a long time and has evolved in recent months," a SentinelOne spokesperson. "It appears to be mostly targeted at Chinese/Asia-Pacific communities."Īs users installed the 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. Is it hot in here? Phil Stokes the fire- Adventures in Reversing Malicious Run-Only AppleScripts: OSAMiner is a cryptominer campaign that has resisted full researcher analysis for at least five years. … One of the nice things about AppleScript is not only does it have a magic at the beginning of an AppleScript file it also has one to mark the end of the script: … fa de de ad or FADE DEAD. 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 … shows exactly how powerful run-only AppleScripts can be for evasion and anti-analysis. In this case, we have not seen the actor use any of the more powerful features of AppleScript … but that is an attack vector that remains wide open and which many defensive tools are not equipped to handle. In the event that other threat actors begin picking up on the utility of … run-only AppleScripts, we hope this research and the tools discussed above will prove to be of use to analysts. īut this Anonymous Coward thinks Phil is hyping it up a bit: applescript-disassembler has been around for at least four years and it's just one "run only AppleScript" disassembler. However, nneonneo has more nuance "Run-only" AppleScript is compiled to a bytecode format that is very poorly documented. … I can't be too surprised that run-only AppleScript ended up as a good malware vector: It's so poorly documented, and there are so few tools to understand it, that it could easily fly under the radar. Trojans gonna … Troje? 93 Escort Wagon drives it home: Sounds like if you haven't been pirating software, you don't have to worry about it. Push the button, numpad0: There are people who actively avoid official distribution, thinking … anything should come through a middle man. What the heck is a run-only script? Is that like write-only memory? CaptQuark leads a charmed life: "Run Only" just means it has been processed into a compacted version of the program that isn't easy to edit.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |