That means it could prove very difficult to take down.įor now, every Mac infected with Silver Sparrow communicates with a control server every hour to see if there's new commands to carry out. Silver Sparrow is being taken very seriously because of how successful it has already been at quietly infecting over 30,000 Macs around the world, but also because the malware is using Amazon Web Services and Akamai for its command infrastructure. Macs located in 153 different countries are known to be infected, although the highest volumes are found in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, and Germany. Silver Sparrow is also unusual because it's only the second known piece of malware capable of targeting Apple's new M1 ARM architecture Macs, and because it hasn't done anything yet. The novelty of this downloader arises primarily from the way it uses JavaScript for execution-something we hadn’t previously encountered in other macOS malware." If a reminder were needed that no platform is safe from infection, a brand new strain of malware has been found hiding on 30,000 Macs waiting to be told what to do.Īs Ars Technica reports (Opens in a new window), the new macOS malware was discovered by security vendor Red Canary (Opens in a new window), with the company naming this unusual strain "Silver Sparrow." Why is it unusual? As Red Canary's Tony Lambert explains, Silver Sparrow "did not exhibit the behaviors that we’ve come to expect from the usual adware that so often targets macOS systems. An Apple Spokesperson was also keen to point out "there is no evidence to suggest the malware they identified has delivered a malicious payload to infected users." In so doing, it prevents new macOS machines from being infected. UPDATE 2/23: Following the discovery of this new strain of malware, Apple reacted yesterday by revoking the certificates of the developer accounts used to sign the packages.
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