In a recent announcement, Jamf Threat Labs, a Minneapolis-based cybersecurity firm revealed its study about the crypto-jacking program which has been targeting Mac users. The firm noted that the jacking program is coming in hidden copies of Apple’s Final Cut Pro.
Final Cut Pro is a professional non-linear video-editing application initially developed by Macromedia, and, since 1998, by Apple as part of its pro apps collection. It allows Apple users to import, edit, and process video footage, and output it to a wide variety of formats.
Cryptojacking is a cybercrime in which another party’s computing resources are hijacked to mine cryptocurrency. Cryptojacking, which is also referred to as malicious crypto mining, lets hackers mine cryptocurrency without paying for electricity, hardware, and other mining resources.
In its recent report, the cybersecurity firm warned that Apple’s chip speed will make Macs increasingly popular targets for malware attacks. The report stated:
During routine monitoring of our threat detections in the wild, we encountered an alert indicating XMRig usage, a command-line crypto-mining tool. While XMRig is commonly used for legitimate purposes, its adaptable, open-source design has also made it a popular choice for malicious actors.
XMRig uses the Invisible Internet Project (i2P) communications protocol to communicate. With this, it can also send mined cryptocurrency to the attacker’s wallet. The malware also attempts to trick Mac users into completely disabling Apple’s Gatekeeper protection to make the pirate application run.
The security firm warns “cryptojacking” malware will become an increasingly prevalent threat for Mac users with the power of Apple ARM processors today. Experts reveal that Apple’s M1 16-core Neural Engine processor is capable of 11 trillion operations per second which represents a 15 times increase in machine learning performance over prior M1s. The report stated:
Given that crypto-mining requires a significant amount of processing power, it is likely that the ongoing advancements in Apple ARM processors will make macOS devices even more attractive targets for cryptojacking.
Apple also released a warning about this crypto-jacking malware in its Insider report. It had cautioned users to be vigilant of the activities on their Macs as the threat from this program is significantly higher. Additionally, macOS Ventura, Apple’s latest operating system, fails to prevent the crypto miner from executing. Apple stated that “users might be unable to rely on their antimalware software to detect the infection — at least for now.”
Notably, this crypto-jacking malware challenged the promises of full-proof security that Apple promises its users. Apple aficionados often boast that they are immune from viruses and malware, but this incident suggests otherwise.
The increasing dominance of malicious actors in the crypto space has put regulators and investors in a tough spot. As per data, the previous year has been anticipated to be largely in favor of crypto hackers and scammers, with huge losses throughout the year.
Immunefi, a bug bounty and security services platform for the Web3 ecosystem, published a report on the losses incurred in the crypto sector in 2022. As per the report, the crypto industry lost $3.9 billion in the previous year. Amongst these losses, hacks were found to be the main causes, accounting for 95.6% of the total, and the rest, 4.4%, comprising fraud, scams, and rug pulls.