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2023-08-10 10:00:00 | Les systèmes Mac se sont transformés en nœuds de sortie proxy par adcharge Mac systems turned into proxy exit nodes by AdLoad (lien direct) |
This blog was jointly written by Fernando Martinez Sidera and Ofer Caspi, AT&T Alien Labs threat intelligence researchers.
Executive summary
AdLoad malware is still infecting Mac systems years after its first appearance in 2017. AdLoad, a package bundler, has been observed delivering a wide range of payloads throughout its existence. During AT&T Alien Labs’ investigation of its most recent payload, it was discovered that the most common component dropped by AdLoad during the past year has been a proxy application turning MacOS AdLoad victims into a giant, residential proxy botnet.
Key takeaways:
AdLoad malware is still present and infecting systems, with a previously unreported payload.
At least 150 samples have been observed in the wild during the last year.
AT&T Alien Labs has observed thousands of IPs behaving as proxy exit nodes in a manner similar to AdLoad infected systems. This behavior could indicate that thousands of Mac systems have been hijacked to act as proxy exit nodes.
The samples analyzed in this blog are unique to MacOS, but Windows samples have also been observed in the wild.
Analysis
AdLoad is one of several widespread adware and bundleware loaders currently impacting macOS. The OSX malware has been present since 2017, with big campaigns in the last two years as reported by SentinelOne in 2021 and Microsoft in 2022. As stated in Microsoft’s report on UpdateAgent, a malware delivering AdLoad through drive-by compromise, AdLoad redirected users’ traffic through the adware operators’ servers, injecting advertisements and promotions into webpages and search results with a Person-in-The-Middle (PiTM) attack.
These two previous campaigns, together with the campaign described in this blog, support the theory that AdLoad could be running a pay-per-Install campaign in the infected systems.
The main purpose of the malware has always been to act as a downloader for subsequent payloads.
It has been identified delivering a wide range of payloads (adware, bundleware, PiTM, backdoors, proxy applications, etc.) every few months to a year, sometimes conveying different payloads depending on the system settings such as geolocation, device make and model, operating system version, or language settings, as reported by SentinelOne.
In all observed samples, regardless of payload, they report an Adload server during execution on the victim’s system.
This beacon (analyzed later in Figure 3 & 4) includes system information in the user agent and the body, without any relevant response aside from a 200 HTTP response code.
This activity probably represents AdLoad\'s method of keeping count of the number of infected systems, supporting the pay-per-Install scheme.
AT&T Alien Labs™ has observed similar activity in our threat analysis systems throughout the last year, with the AdLoad malware being installed in the infected systems. However, Alien Labs is now observing a previously unreported payload being delivered to the victims. The payload corresponds to a proxy application, converting its targets into proxy exit nodes after infection. As seen in Figure 1, the threat actors behind this campaign have been very active since the beginning of 2022.
Figure 1. Histogram of AdLoad samples identified by Alien Labs.
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