MacBooks Are Taking A Hit Again In Monero Mining Attack

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After having banned the Calendar app that mined Monero on MacBooks without the consent of the owners, Apple is going to have to deal with a new threat to its same MacBooks over the mining of the Monero cryptocurrency.
Researchers at Malwarebytes, a cybersecurity agency, have reported that a new kind of malware has been has been attacking MacBooks recently to mine Monero with the devices hardware. The firm stated on Tuesday in one of its own blog posts that one process on MacBooks by name “mshelper” is being used by an unanimous attacker to mine the cryptocurrency. The process, per the post actually uses huge amounts of the CPU power of the Macs, but wasn’t much of a threat to be worried about. The post explained that

“Affected users saw their fans whirring out of control and a process named ‘mshelper’ gobbling up CPU time like Cookie Monster. Fortunately, this malware is not very sophisticated and is easy to remove. The malware became public knowledge in a post on Apple’s discussion forums, where the “mshelper” process was found to be the culprit. Digging deeper, it was discovered that there were a couple other suspicious processes installed as well. We went searching and found copies of these files.”

The researchers found the malware to have three basic parts or components. The first being a “dropper” which initially downloads the malware unto the Mac, a launcher which installed the malware, and the last component: an XMRig based miner for the real deal; Monero mining.
The post explained that the kind of language used for the writing of the malware is Golang, which could indicate that the developer of the malware is not so good or familiar with Apple Macs. The blog writer, Reed, advised Mac users to avoid downloading free softwares like Adobe Flash Player Installers for now, as the dropper program mostly came with such illegitimate freebies. He also acknowledged that there is an increasing number of mining attack on Mac products, mostly for Monero mining. He further advised that

“Mac cryptomining malware has been on the rise recently, just as in the Windows world. This malware follows other cryptominers for macOS … I’d rather be infected with a cryptominer than some other kind of malware, but that doesn’t make it a good thing.”

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Featured Images Courtesy CNET & ZDNet