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....
Disclaimer: This malware sample is not in any way related to Hacking Team (as far as I know) other than me making some jokes about them related to a future presentation about their OS X malware product. Two months ago (maybe three) I started noticing a sporadic redirect when I accessed these blog pages. It wasn’t anything “malicious” as far as I could evaluate; just a redirect to adult friend finder site....
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....
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....