A popular software in a professional environment for working with multimedia is used by hackers to deploy hidden malicious programs for mining cryptocurrency in MacOS systems.
The harmful campaign was discovered by Jamf Threat Labs. According to experts, the XMRIG crypto -chain was launched using the unauthorized modification of the Final Cut Pro, Apple video editing software.
“This harmful software is used by Invisible Internet Project (I2P) to load malicious components and send the mined currency to the crypto -coaling of an attacker,” said Jamf Threat Labs researchers in their report, published.
The earlier iteration of this harmful campaign was documented exactly a year ago by Trend Micro, which indicated the use of malicious I2P to conceal network traffic. Then Trend Micro experts suggested that the harm could be delivered as a DMG file for Adobe Photoshop CC 2019.
, the malicious versions of the Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro X programs were posted on the popular The Pirate Bay pirate content service. Other professional programs posted back in 2019 were also discovered there. All this time, the harm was modified and made more secretive for antivirus systems.
Happy programs on The Pirate Bay
The ability of malicious programs to remain unnoticed on the victim’s computer in combination with the fact that users, and so, are usually ready for the fact that antivirus solutions can respond to the built -in “Crack” – make the malnutrition vector very effective.
Apple, however, took some steps to combat the spread of such software. Now notarized applications are subjected to more stringent checks in MacOS Ventura, so the launch of fake applications is very difficult.
“on the other hand, MacOS Ventura did not interfere with the launch of the crypto -meter,” said the researchers of Jamf Threat Labs. “By the time the user receives an error message, the malicious program will already be installed in the system.”
In general, Apple is definitely still working on safety plan, and users should take a closer look at the software loading source. Especially if they do not want to pay for him.