Malicious advertisements and bogus web sites are performing as a conduit to ship two completely different stealer malware, together with Atomic Stealer, concentrating on Apple macOS customers.
The continued infostealer assaults concentrating on macOS customers might have adopted completely different strategies to compromise victims’ Macs, however function with the top aim of stealing delicate knowledge, Jamf Menace Labs stated in a report revealed Friday.
One such assault chain targets customers trying to find Arc Browser on search engines like google and yahoo like Google to serve bogus advertisements that redirect customers to look-alike websites (“airci[.]web”) that serve the malware.
“Apparently, the malicious web site can’t be accessed straight, because it returns an error,” safety researchers Jaron Bradley, Ferdous Saljooki, and Maggie Zirnhelt stated. “It may solely be accessed by way of a generated sponsored hyperlink, presumably to evade detection.”
The disk picture file downloaded from the counterfeit web site (“ArcSetup.dmg”) delivers Atomic Stealer, which is understood to request customers to enter their system passwords through a faux immediate and finally facilitate info theft.
Jamf stated it additionally found a phony web site known as meethub[.]gg that claims to supply a free group assembly scheduling software program, however truly installs one other stealer malware able to harvesting customers’ keychain knowledge, saved credentials in internet browsers, and data from cryptocurrency wallets.
Very like Atomic stealer, the malware – which is alleged to overlap with a Rust-based stealer household often known as Realst – additionally prompts the person for his or her macOS login password utilizing an AppleScript name to hold out its malicious actions.
Assaults leveraging this malware are stated to have approached victims below the pretext of discussing job alternatives and interviewing them for a podcast, subsequently asking them to obtain an app from meethub[.]gg to affix a video convention offered within the assembly invitations.
“These assaults are sometimes targeted on these within the crypto business as such efforts can result in giant payouts for attackers,” the researchers stated. “These within the business must be hyper-aware that it is usually straightforward to search out public info that they’re asset holders or can simply be tied to an organization that places them on this business.”
The event comes as MacPaw’s cybersecurity division Moonlock Lab disclosed that malicious DMG information (“App_v1.0.4.dmg”) are being utilized by menace actors to deploy a stealer malware designed to extract credentials and knowledge from numerous purposes.
That is completed via an obfuscated AppleScript and bash payload that is retrieved from a Russian IP deal with, the previous of which is used to launch a misleading immediate (as talked about above) to trick customers into offering the system passwords.
“Disguised as a innocent DMG file, it tips the person into set up through a phishing picture, persuading the person to bypass macOS’s Gatekeeper safety characteristic,” safety researcher Mykhailo Hrebeniuk stated.
The event is a sign that macOS environments are more and more below menace from stealer assaults, with some strains even boasting of refined anti-virtualization methods by activating a self-destructing kill change to evade detection.
In latest weeks, malvertising campaigns have additionally been noticed pushing the FakeBat loader (aka EugenLoader) and different info stealers like Rhadamanthys through a Go-based loader by way of decoy websites for in style software program akin to Notion and PuTTY.
