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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. 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. 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. 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. … 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.

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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.

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'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. 'OSAMiner has been active for a long time and has evolved in recent months,' a SentinelOne spokesperson. Named OSAMiner, the malware has been distributed in the wild since at least 2015. … 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.

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Run-only AppleScript … makes decompiling them into source code a tall order. 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. has been in the wild since at least 2015.

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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. Not to mention: What everyone really wants. Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment. What can DevOps learn from this? In this week’s Security Blogwatch, we learn lessons (not “learnings”).

So it’s hard to extract indicators of compromise out of malware obfuscated by them.

So-called run-only scripts-what we might today call “bytecode”-are poorly documented and difficult to analyze. This cryptominer Trojan spread unchecked for some five years. An AppleScript feature designed to compress scripts into pre-compiled form has allowed bad actors to evade security researchers for years.

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