Writing Bad @$$ Lamware for OS X

The following is a guest post by noar (@noarfromspace), a long time friend. It shows some simple attacks against BlockBlock, a software developed by Patrick Wardle that monitors OS X common persistence locations for potential malware. The other day noar was telling me about a few bypasses he had found so I invited him to write a guest post. The title is obviously playing with one of Patrick’s presentations. I met Patrick at Shakacon last year and this is not an attempt to shame him (that is reserved mostly for Apple ;-))....

August 7, 2015 · 5 min · 984 words

How to fix rootpipe in Mavericks and call Apple’s bullshit bluff about rootpipe fixes

The rootpipe vulnerability was finally fully disclosed last week after a couple of months of expectation since its first announcement. It was disclosed as a hidden backdoor but it’s really something more related to access control and crap design than a backdoor. Although keep in mind that good backdoors should be hard to distinguish from simple errors. In this case there are a lot of services using this feature so it’s hardly a hidden backdoor that just sits there waiting for some evil purpose....

April 13, 2015 · 17 min · 3458 words

Can I SUID: a TrustedBSD policy module to control suid binaries execution

Let me present you another TrustedBSD policy module, this time to control execution of suid enabled binaries. The idea to create this started with nemo’s exploitation of bash’s shellshock bug and VMware Fusion. It was an easy local privilege escalation because there are many Fusion suid enabled binaries. This got me thinking that I want to know when this kind of binaries are executed and if possible control access to them....

October 3, 2014 · 2 min · 421 words

Shakacon #6 presentation: Fuck you Hacking Team, From Portugal with Love.

Aloha, Shakacon number 6 is over, it was a blast and I must confess it beat my expectations. Congratulations to everyone involved in making it possible. Definitely recommended if you want to speak or attend, and totally worth the massive jet lag. My presentation was about reverse engineering Hacking Team OS X malware latest known sample. The slide count is 206 and I was obviously not able to present everything. The goal is that you have a nice reference available for this malware and also MPRESS unpacking (technically dumping)....

June 26, 2014 · 1 min · 207 words

Analysis of CoinThief/A "dropper"

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....

February 16, 2014 · 8 min · 1671 words