macOS Infostealers That Actively Involve in Attacks Evade XProtect Detection

Ever since the beginning of 2023, infostealers targeting macOS have been on the rise with many threat actors actively targeting Apple devices. As of last year, many variants of Atomic Stealer, macOS meta stealer, RealStealer, and many others were discovered.



However, Apple updated their built-in antivirus “XProtect” signature databases in macOS which denotes that Apple is completely aware of these info stealers and has been taking necessary measures to prevent them. On the other side, threat actors have been constantly evolving and evading known signatures.






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Technical Analysis – The Three Active Infostealers



According to the reports shared with Cyber Security News, Keysteal, Atomic InfoStealer, and CherryPie were three active infostealers that presently evade many static signature detection engines including XProtect. 



KeySteal



This stealer was first discovered in 2021 and has been constantly evolving with evasion techniques. Some of the distributions of this malware were under the binary name “ChatGPT”. Apple added a signature for this malware in 2023 inside XProtect which no longer works.



Recent sample of KeySteal (Source: SentinelOne )



During the initial stages of this Keysteal, it was distributed with a .pkg format embedded inside the “ReSignTool” macOS utility. It is coded in such a way to steal Keychain information which holds a lot of sensitive password information and establish persistence on the affected device.



The latest version of KeySteal replaces “ReSignTool” with multi-architecture Mach-O binaries under the names “UnixProject” and “ChatGPT”. The malware is written in Objective C and current distribution methods are unclear.



Atomic Infostealer



Apple updated their XProtect Signature databases for detecting this malware earlier this month. But it seems like threat actors have up-to-date information about the signature detection and have modified the malware with a Go language version shortly after the signature update.



In addition to this, this malware has been seen with completely different development chains, unlike other infostealers which update only the core version. There have been several variations of this malware currently in the wild attacking macOS devices.




Another bunch of #Amos #AtomicStealer samples that evade the recent #XProtect v2178 SOMA_E signature. #apple #security #malware https://t.co/m3ubSlopDU pic.twitter.com/MPhMavJM3S — Phil Stokes ⫍