Called Silver Sparrow, the malicious software attacked Apple computers, but its goal is still a mystery.
M1: new malware has a version that works on Apple’s newly launched processors (Bloomberg / Contributor / Getty Images)
A new type of malware has been detected in more than 30,000 Macs, the computers of Apple. It was called “Silver Sparrow” by the security company Red Canary and has a peculiarity: so far, researchers do not know exactly what it does.
The virus is already in 153 countries, with the highest number of cases in the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and France. In a post on the company’s blog, Red Canary states that the main purpose of Silver Sparrow is currently “a mystery”.
Another feature of the malware is that there are two versions of it, one that works on Macs with Intel processors, and the other for recently launched computers with M1 processors.
There are few behaviors identified at the time of Silver Sparrow. One is that, once every hour, infected computers send a check command to the control server in search of new commands to execute. The virus also has the ability to remove itself, a mechanism that is typically reserved for covert operations.
Interestingly, the version of the malware that runs on computers with M1 uses the JavaScript installer API to execute commands, which makes it difficult to analyze the contents of installation packages or the way in which packages execute commands.
“Although we have not yet observed that Silver Sparrow is delivering malicious activity yet, compatibility with the M1 chip, global reach, relatively high infection rate and operational maturity, suggest that malware is a reasonably serious threat, positioned to cause damage to any time, “wrote Red Canary researchers.
According to the portal Mashable, Apple said that since discovering the presence of malware on company computers, it has revoked the certificates of the developer accounts associated with signing the packages and new Macs are prevented from future infections.
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