Today I discovered that my slides contain a (stupid) error! The story begins with Alex Ionescu telling me the symbols are still available in kernel memory in Mountain Lion. I quickly verified this by doing memory dumps and it was really true. Today I finally got some time to sort it out and verify where they were. To my great surprise I fucked up bigtime on my manual calculations and was dumping the wrong memory area (DUH!...
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....
This is an up-to-date version of the old original post about recompiling GDB and other open source packages available at opensource.apple.com. I’m doing it mostly because code signing is now mandatory for GDB and there’s a stupid old bug that Apple still didn’t fixed since Snow Leopard. I forgot about it on my latest reinstall and lost an afternoon. This way you and me will not make the same mistake....
More than half a year as passed since HITCON'12 and as far as I know no one cared much about implementing some sort of detection/protection against this type of attack (correct me if I’m wrong). As explained in HITCON slides, this trick can be very useful to install backdoors and avoid the usual lame LaunchDaemons type of thing. I did some massive cleanup to the original PoC that I had glued for HITCON but it’s still a bit messy and definitely not “production” ready....
Another day, another lame malware attacking and spying on OS X users, and still using the same old lame Daemons and Agents approach to gain persistence at victims machine. Hey, it works, so why change, right? Ice the Guardian v2 is a quick hack using TrustedBSD to monitor the system LaunchDaemons and LaunchAgents folders. There’s a lot of room for improvement so I’m waiting for your commits 😉. Apple has the technology in place so they could probably implement something like this default oin OS X....