It seems that no one escapes malware. This time it’s Apple’s turn. It is called Silver Sparrow and affects the entire macOS ecosystem. In particular, it is attacking Macs with Apple M1. However, researchers are still missing the target of the attack.
A mysterious and far-reaching malware
According to Red Canary researchers, this malware is affecting thousands of Apple users worldwide. It has been located on 29,139 Macs worldwide. So far they have found it in 153 countries. The list includes the following: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France and Germany.
For its part, Arstechnica indicates that researchers are observing some infected machines to find out the ultimate target of the crime.They suspect that Silver Sparrow could go into action when an unknown condition is met. In this regard, the researchers state that “the malware is very mysterious, because it uses the JavaScript API of the macOS installer to execute commands. That makes it difficult to analyze the contents of the installation package or how that package uses JavaScript commands.”
A threat to be concerned about
Although there is no further information on this cyberattack, it is a threat to be concerned about. The researchers state: “While we have not yet observed Silver Sparrow delivering additional malicious payloads, its compatibility with the M1 chip, global reach, high infection rate and operational maturity suggest that it is a reasonably serious threat”.
The information at hand about the behavior of this malware is as follows. According to research, it forces infected Macs to check a control server once an hour. It also appears to have some sort of self-destruct mechanism. However, the latter has not yet been used. Finally, this Silver Sparrow malware also affects and runs natively on Apple’s M1 chip. Which means that it is the second malware discovered during the last few days for this processor.
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