By Mac Threat Response and Mobile Research Team
We have discovered an unusual infection related to Xcode developer projects. Upon further investigation, we discovered that a developer’s Xcode project at large contained the source malware, which leads to a rabbit hole of malicious payloads. Most notable in our investigation is the discovery of two zero-day exploits: one is used to steal cookies via a flaw in the behavior of Data Vaults, another is used to abuse the development version of Safari.
This scenario is quite unusual; in this case, malicious code is injected into local Xcode projects so that when the project is built, the malicious code is run. This poses a risk for Xcode developers in particular. The threat escalates since we have identified affected developers who shared their projects on GitHub, leading to a supply-chain-like attack for users who rely on these repositories as dependencies in their own projects. We have also identified this threat in sources such as VirusTotal, which indicates this threat is at large.
This blog will summarize the findings of this threat, while its accompanying technical brief contains the full details of this attack. We detected the entry threat as TrojanSpy.MacOS.XCSSET.A and its command and control (C&C) related files as Backdoor.MacOS.XCSSET.A.
This threat primarily spreads via Xcode projects and maliciously modified applications created from the malware. It is not yet clear how the threat initially enters these systems. Presumably, these systems would be primarily used by developers. These Xcode projects have been modified such that upon building, these projects would run a ..
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