macOS Infostealers That Actively Involve in Attacks Evade XProtect Detection
Ever since the beginning of 2023, infostealers targeting macOS have been on the rise with many threat actors actively targeting Apple devices. As of last year, many variants of Atomic Stealer, macOS meta stealer, RealStealer, and many others were discovered.
However, Apple updated their built-in antivirus “XProtect” signature databases in macOS which denotes that Apple is completely aware of these info stealers and has been taking necessary measures to prevent them. On the other side, threat actors have been constantly evolving and evading known signatures.
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Technical Analysis – The Three Active Infostealers
According to the reports shared with Cyber Security News, Keysteal, Atomic InfoStealer, and CherryPie were three active infostealers that presently evade many static signature detection engines including XProtect.
KeySteal
This stealer was first discovered in 2021 and has been constantly evolving with evasion techniques. Some of the distributions of this malware were under the binary name “ChatGPT”. Apple added a signature for this malware in 2023 inside XProtect which no longer works.
During the initial stages of this Keysteal, it was distributed with a .pkg format embedded inside the “ReSignTool” macOS utility. It is coded in such a way to steal Keychain information which holds a lot of sensitive password information and establish persistence on the affected device.
The latest version of KeySteal replaces “ReSignTool” with multi-architecture Mach-O binaries under the names “UnixProject” and “ChatGPT”. The malware is written in Objective C and current distribution methods are unclear.
Atomic Infostealer
Apple updated their XProtect Signature databases for detecting this malware earlier this month. But it seems like threat actors have up-to-date information about the signature detection and have modified the malware with a Go language version shortly after the signature update.
In addition to this, this malware has been seen with completely different development chains, unlike other infostealers which update only the core version. There have been several variations of this malware currently in the wild attacking macOS devices.
Another bunch of
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samples that evade the recent
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](https://twitter.com/hashtag/XProtect?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)
v2178 SOMA_E signature.
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](https://twitter.com/hashtag/malware?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)[
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pic.twitter.com/MPhMavJM3S
— Phil Stokes ⫍🐠⫎ (@philofishal)
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January 12, 2024
](https://twitter.com/philofishal/status/1745807753531011096?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)
The malware is written in C++ and consists of logic to prevent victims, analysts, or malware sandboxes from running the terminal in parallel with the stealer. Furthermore, it also checks if the malware is being tested inside a virtual machine.
The distributions of this malware were through torrents or gaming-focused social media platforms appearing as a “CrackInstaller” with the .dmg format.
CherryPie
This infostealer malware is also known as Gary Stealer or “JaskaGo” which is a cross-platform malware written in Go with extensive logic for anti-analysis and VM detection. However, the malware developers seem too confident that they left extremely obvious strings which indicate the core intent and purpose of this malware.
In some samples, there were traces of using the Wails project for bundling their malicious application. During the execution of this malware, the application calls the spctl utility with the –master-disable argument for disabling the Gatekeeper and runs with administrative privileges.
Furthermore, a complete report about this malware has been published which provides detailed information about the source code, behavior, intent, and other information.
Indicators of Compromise
KeySteal
95d775b68f841f82521d516b67ccd4541b221d17
f75a06398811bfbcb46bad8ab8600f98df4b38d4
usa[.]4jrb7xn8rxsn8o4lghk7lx6vnvnvazva[.]com
Atomic InfoStealer
1b90ea41611cf41dbfb2b2912958ccca13421364
2387336aab3dd21597ad343f7a1dd5aab237f3ae
8119336341be98fd340644e039de1b8e39211254
973cab796a4ebcfb0f6e884025f6e57c1c98b901
b30b01d5743b1b9d96b84ef322469c487c6011c5
df3dec7cddca02e626ab20228f267ff6caf138ae
CherryPie
04cbfa61f2cb8daffd0b2fa58fd980b868f0f951
09de6c864737a9999c0e39c1391be81420158877
6a5b603119bf0679c7ce1007acf7815ff2267c9e
72dfb718d90e8316135912023ab933faf522e78a
85dd9a80feab6f47ebe08cb3725dea7e3727e58f
104[.]243[.]38[.]177
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