Atomic Stealer | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Malicious ads and bogus websites are acting as a conduit to deliver two different stealer malware, including Atomic Stealer, targeting Apple macOS users. The ongoing infostealer attacks targeting macOS users may have adopted different methods to compromise victims' Macs, but operate with the end goal of stealing sensitive data, Jamf Threat Labs  said  in a report published Friday. One such attack chain targets users searching for Arc Browser on search engines like Google to serve bogus ads that redirect users to look-alike sites ("airci[.]net") that serve the malware. "Interestingly, the malicious website cannot be accessed directly, as it returns an error," security researchers Jaron Bradley, Ferdous Saljooki, and Maggie Zirnhelt said. "It can only be accessed through a generated sponsored link, presumably to evade detection." The disk image file downloaded from the counterfeit website ("ArcSetup.dmg") delivers  Atomic Stealer , which i...

Cybersecurity researchers have identified an updated version of a macOS information stealer called  Atomic  (or AMOS), indicating that the threat actors behind the malware are actively enhancing its capabilities. "It looks like Atomic Stealer was updated around mid to late December 2023, where its developers introduced payload encryption in an effort to bypass detection rules," Malwarebytes' Jérôme Segura  said  in a Wednesday report. Atomic Stealer  first emerged  in April 2023 for a monthly subscription of $1,000. It's capable of harvesting sensitive information from a compromised host, including Keychain passwords, session cookies, files, crypto wallets, system metadata, and the machine's password via a fake prompt. Over the past several months, the malware has been observed propagated via  malvertising  and  compromised sites  under the guise of legitimate software and web browser updates. Malwarebytes' latest analysis shows th...

The latest Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 Cloud Threat Report found that sensitive data is found in 66% of cloud storage buckets. This data is vulnerable to ransomware attacks. The SANS Institute recently reported that these attacks can be performed by abusing the cloud provider's storage security controls and default settings. "In just the past few months, I have witnessed two different methods for executing a ransomware attack using nothing but legitimate cloud security features," warns Brandon Evans, security consultant and SANS Certified Instructor. Halcyon disclosed an attack campaign that leveraged one of Amazon S3's native encryption mechanisms, SSE-C, to encrypt each of the target buckets. A few months prior, security consultant Chris Farris demonstrated how attackers could perform a similar attack using a different AWS security feature, KMS keys with external key material, using simple scripts generated by ChatGPT. "Clearly, this topic is top-of-mind for both threat actors and ...

The macOS information stealer known as Atomic is now being delivered to target via a bogus web browser update chain tracked as ClearFake. "This may very well be the first time we see one of the main social engineering campaigns, previously reserved for Windows, branch out not only in terms of geolocation but also operating system," Malwarebytes' Jérôme Segura  said  in a Tuesday analysis. Atomic Stealer (aka AMOS),  first documented  in April 2023, is a commercial stealer malware family that's sold on a subscription basis for $1,000 per month. It comes with capabilities to siphon data from web browsers and cryptocurrency wallets. Then in September 2023, Malwarebytes  detailed  an Atomic Stealer campaign that took advantage of malicious Google ads, tricking macOS users searching for a financial charting platform known as TradingView into downloading the malware. ClearFake, on the other hand, is a nascent malware distribution operation that employs comp...