New Malware Strain Targets Cryptocurrency Fans Who Use Macs

OSX.Dummy depends on substantial help from an unwary victim.

Dark Reading Staff, Dark Reading

July 6, 2018

1 Min Read
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A new strain of MacOS malware is targeting those who like to discuss their cryptocurrency investing in Slack or Discord groups. It depends on a certain level of naiveté on the part of the victim - a level that resulted in the strain being labeled OSX.Dummy.

The social engineering attack presents a request from a user identifying themselves as an administrator of the group. They ask the victim to run a lengthy command in a terminal window, then ignore the 34 Mbyte file that is downloaded. If the victim does both of these things, they find that their Macintosh has been hijacked by a hacker using a C&C server in the Netherlands.

In a comment supplied to Dark Reading, Ryan Benson, senior threat researcher at Exabeam said, "A lot of otherwise non-technical people have jumped on the cryptocurrency bandwagon and want to get involved. Cryptocurrencies are inherently technical, so these less-technical users may be used to following technical how-tos without really understanding what the commands they run are doing. This puts them in dangerous territory and ripe for an attack like this, even if it is 'dumb.'"

For more, read here and here.

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Dark Reading Staff

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