No platform is safe from infection, as we were reminded earlier this year when a new strain of malware was found on 30K Macs.
The new macOS malware was discovered by security vendor Red Canary, who named the unusual strain Silver Sparrow. Silver Sparrow did not exhibit behaviors that are now expected from adware often targeting macOS systems, especially in the way it used JavaScript for execution. It is also considered unusual since it is only the second known piece of malware targeting Apple’s new M1 ARM architecture Macs, but hasn’t actually done anything yet. Infections have affected Macs across 153 different countries, with the highest volumes found in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, and Germany.
Every infected Mac is communicating with a control server every hour to see if there’s new commands to carry out; so far, none have been issued. The malware can also remove itself from a system, meaning it could execute a command then disappear. Since the original report on the new and unusual malware was published, it was also updated with Apple’s reaction. Certificates of the developer accounts used to sign the packages were revoked in order to prevent new macOS machines from infection. To learn more, and read the full and updated story, visit here.
