There is no such thing as malware in OS X but last week another sample was spotted and made the “news”. I am talking about CoinThief, a malware designed to hijack Bitcoin accounts and steal everything (I must confess I laughed a bit; I think Bitcoin is just a bullshit pyramid scheme but I digress). There are a few samples out there, in different stages of evolution, so this is probably not a very recent operation....
Oh this one has been into my head for so long that I finally decided to try and create the code for it. So let’s go! What’s the background story? In August 2011 I reported to Apple a security issue with iTunes. What happens is that iTunes plugins are loaded into iTunes process space so they have full control of iTunes. Evil plugins can do all kinds of things such as stealing iTunes passwords and credit card information, or patching some annoying features as I did with Disable m3u plugin....
For some reason Apple wants to change external kernel extensions location from /System/Library/Extensions to /Library/Extensions and introduced in Mavericks a code signing requirement for all extensions and/or drivers located in that folder. Extensions will not be loaded if not signed (those located in the “old” folder and not signed will only generate a warning [check my SyScan360 slides]). The signing certificates require a special configuration and to obtain them you need to justify it....
Last week ESET released a Rootkit Detector tool for OS X. I finally gave a look at it today and as I suspected it is useless (unless rootkit authors are not reading my slides like ESET does not seem to). The only thing it appears to be doing is to check if sysent pointers were modified. Let’s be honest, it’s useless in particular when they mention they have limited visibility into OS X rootkits....
SyScan 2013, 10th anniversary edition is over! It is a great conference and I hope it does not end here. I had lots of fun and met new interesting people. Thomas is an awesome host! It helps that I really like Singapore and Asia in general. My presentation was about Mac OS X kernel rootkits based on the article I submitted to Phrack. Because Phrack is late, I was trying to postpone public availability of my slides....