LABScon23 Replay | macOS Components Used in North Korean Crypto-Heists | Greg Lesnewich

While many state-aligned threats have dipped their toes into macOS malware, North Korea has invested serious time and effort into compromising that operating system. Its operations in macOS environments include both espionage and financial gain. macOS malware analysis is an exciting space, but most blogs on the subject deal with functionality and capability, rather than how to find more similar samples. Analysts are forced to rely on string searching, based on disassembler output or a strings dump. Comparatively, executables for Windows have “easy” pivots such as import hashing or rich headers, to find additional samples without much effort.

This talk introduces some of those easy pivots for Mach-O files, using North Korean samples as an initial case study. Along the way, Greg Lesnewich takes us on a tour of the North Korean clusters using Mach-O samples, how those clusters intersect, how their families relate to one another, and shows how some simple pivots can link a group’s families together.