First Malware Designed for Apple M1 Chip Discovered in the Wild

Description

Summary

• One of the first malware samples tailored to run natively on Apple's M1 chips has been discovered, suggesting a new development that indicates that bad actors have begun adapting malicious software to target the company's latest generation of Macs powered by its own processors.
• The rogue extension, which is a variant of the Pirrit advertising malware, was first seen in the wild on November 23, 2020, according to a sample uploaded to VirusTotal on December 27. "
• First documented in 2016, Pirrit is a persistent Mac adware family notorious for pushing intrusive and deceptive advertisements to users that, when clicked, downloads and installs unwanted apps that come with information gathering features.
• Although the development highlights how malware continues to evolve in direct response to both hardware changes, Wardle warned that "(static) analysis tools or antivirus engines may struggle with arm64 binaries," with detections from industry-leading security software dropping by 15% when compared to the Intel x86_64 version.