This chapter was supposed to be about additional methods to detect OS.X/Crisis but I had the evil idea of taking full control of Crisis, and played with this idea for the last couple of days. It’s pretty damm easy to customize the dropper, and at the limit, be able to deploy your own version of Crisis to anyone. This raises some problematic questions, some of which I was fooling around with at Twitter....
I always had some strange attraction to rootkits and was thrilled to hear that Crisis had one. This chapter is dedicated to the rootkit implementation, its tricks and how it’s controlled (and its fuckups!). A small disclosure note about me making fun of Italians on Twitter. I love Italy and have nothing against Italians. We just share some cultural things that I really hate and that’s the reason why I was making fun of Crisis origins and some of its design/features....
Let’s continue our cute story about OS.X/Crisis, this time with the startup flow of the main backdoor module. Please apologize for the delay on this chapter – I had some fun with the rootkit and that diverted me to other things. The first curious detail about the backdoor module (installed as /Users/USERNAME/Library/Preferences/jlc3V7we.app/IZsROY7X.-MP) is that no obfuscation/anti-debugging tricks are used (except one) so its analysis is easier than the dropper. It also uses Objective-C heavily, which is still a bit annoying in IDA but has the advantage of the code being very descriptive....
Mac malware is back to news spotlight, this time with Crisis (insert one of the other thousand names here _____). This malware is nothing more than commercial spy software being sold by a lot of money to governments or something (oh boy, I could make a good living out of this). I’m lucky enough to have a sample of it (thank you, you know who you are!) and also lucky to be able to talk about it (it uses some similar tricks that I knew about)....
I love to read about the Human brain and yesterday I was feeling weird about this thing. As far as I know, everyone (publicly) was trying to search sysent in one way or another after Apple removed the sysent symbols but not bruteforcing it. It seems no one bothered to question the original method (Landon Fuller?) and just kept using it. Are there any historical reasons for this? I can’t remember any....