Microsoft Reveals Tactics Used by 4 Ransomware Families Targeting macOS

Microsoft has lose light on 4 unique ransomware people – KeRanger, FileCoder, MacRansom, and EvilQuest – that are known to impression Apple macOS devices.

“Although these malware families are old, they exemplify the assortment of capabilities and malicious behavior probable on the platform,” the tech giant’s Security Threat Intelligence group mentioned in a Thursday report.

The original vector for these ransomware families entails what the Windows maker calls “user-assisted procedures,” wherein the sufferer downloads and installs trojanized purposes.

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Alternatively, it can also arrive as a second-stage payload that is dropped by an previously existing malware on the contaminated host or as aspect of a supply chain attack.

Irrespective of the modus operandi utilized, the attacks commence together related lines, with the danger actors relying on respectable running system features and exploiting vulnerabilities to split into the methods and encrypt data files of fascination.

This contains the use of the Unix find utility as effectively as library functions like opendir, readdir, and closedir to enumerate data files. A further technique pointed out by Microsoft, but not adopted by the ransomware strains, entails the NSFileManager Aim-C interface.

KeRanger, MacRansom, and EvilQuest have also been observed to benefit from a mixture of components- and computer software-dependent checks to ascertain if the malware is jogging in a digital setting in an try to resist investigation and debugging attempts.

KeRanger, notably, employs a procedure recognised as delayed execution to escape detection. It achieves this by sleeping for 3 days upon its start right before kick-commencing its malicious features.

Persistence, which is crucial to making sure that the malware is run even right after a system restart, is recognized by usually means of launch agents and kernel queues, Microsoft pointed out.

Although FileCoder makes use of the ZIP utility to encrypt documents, KeRanger takes advantage of AES encryption in cipher block chaining (CBC) method to accomplish its objectives. The two MacRansom and EvilQuest, on the other hand, leverage a symmetric encryption algorithm.

EvilQuest, which was first exposed in July 2020, further more goes further than typical ransomware to include other trojan-like functions, such as keylogging, compromising Mach-O documents by injecting arbitrary code, and disabling security software package.

It also packs in capabilities to execute any file specifically from memory, properly leaving no trace of the payload on disk.

“Ransomware proceeds to be just one of the most widespread and impactful threats affecting organizations, with attackers frequently evolving their procedures and expanding their tradecraft to cast a wider net of possible targets,” Microsoft said.

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