New Malware “Silver Sparrow” Infects Apple M1 Macbooks

While malware for Windows and Linux are far more common, infections are rare on Mac. According to a report by Malwarebytes, Silver Sparrow has infected more than 30,000 machines.

Discovered by Red Canary along with Malwarebytes and VMWare Carbon Black. As of February 17, it has spread over 157 countries with the majority of users located in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, United States and Germany.

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The purpose of the malware and what it intends to do is still unclear. Moreover, researchers don’t know if it spreads through the use of pirated apps, ads or some other sources. Fake Flash distributors are the major sources of infection on Mac devices.

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Silver Sparrow and Apple M1 chips

The new infection also affects Apple’s latest M1 chips. This means that the new infection is an advanced one. To be precise, this is the second infection that has made its way to the Apple M1 architecture. The first-ever infection was detected just four days before Silver Sparrow was detected.

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Though we haven’t observed Silver Sparrow delivering additional malicious payloads yet, its forward-looking M1 chip compatibility, global reach, relatively high infection rate, and operational maturity suggest Silver Sparrow is a reasonably serious threat, uniquely positioned to deliver a potentially impactful payload at a moment’s notice.

Given these causes for concern, in the spirit of transparency, we wanted to share everything we know with the broader infosec industry sooner rather than later.

According to Lambert

While the report by Red Canary talks about the files and the paths used by the new infection. Having said that, the intentions of the new malware is yet to be determined.