Cyber criminals are now porting malware to Apple's M1 chips, starting with a Safari adware extension that security researcher Patrick Wardle found recompiled for ARM architecture. As M1 Macs become mainstream, attackers will increasingly write malware for both Intel PCs and ARM Macs, making detection harder and expanding their attack surface.
Chapters
Cyber threats are porting malware to Apple chips. With Apple releasing its new M1 CPU chip used in Macintosh computers, software developers port their products for compatibility and performance. Well, now we're seeing cyber threats do the same with their malicious software. A macOS security researcher, Patrick Wardle, recently discovered a Safari adware extension originally written to run on Intel x86 architecture. But has now been ported to run on ARM-based M1 chips. Now, this represents an approach by cyber threats, fraudsters, criminals, data harvesters, whatnot, to create multi-architecture applications. And that will give them a much wider attack surface and better chances to be successful in their exploits. So as threats write malware that is optimized for, well, CPUs, OSs, and applications, they take advantage of those architectures to remain better hidden or to be able to leverage known vulnerabilities or exploits that exist in the hardware and the software. And now with threats porting malware over, um, it's going to be optimized for Apple M1 chips, whereas originally they were probably likely optimized for Intel CPUs, which were in Apple devices, in Apple laptops and, and computers beforehand. So expect attacks to begin climbing for Apple hardware over time. Now, this is a natural evolution of attackers seeking better capabilities by adapting to Apple's new mainstream hardware, which is pretty impressive. The M1 is an impressive chip, and it's based upon ARM technology versus Intel's x86 architectures. So in the end, they both do something very similar, but how they do it is fundamentally different based on their architecture. And this activity of porting information, well, it's it's really only the beginning. Before long, we should expect that it will be standard practice for malware to be written and optimized to target both PC and Mac users. So M1 users, welcome to the waters where cybercriminals are on the hunt.
