Macs with an Apple Silicon processor have only been available since
November 2020, but hackers haven't waited long to look into this new
architecture.
Apple marked the news at the end of 2020 with the presentation of its first MacBook and Mac Mini equipped with an M1 chip.
A first malware in the form of a Safari extension
With these new
machines, the Californian manufacturer began a two-year transition that
will see it abandon Intel processors in favor of its own ARM chips,
developed in-house.
The small market share of the Mac compared to
PCs running Windows has always more or less spared owners of iMac or
MacBook, hackers primarily interested in these platforms are fewer than
those targeting Windows 10.
However, the hype around the Mac M1
has apparently aroused the interest of hackers with the discovery of the
first malware specifically targeting the first machines equipped with
Apple Silicon processors.
read also: Operating Systems: Unbeatable Windows, ChromeOS above macOS
A very easy transition from x86 to ARM that chews up the work of hackers
It
was security researcher Patrick Wardle who discovered the existence of
an extension for the Safari browser called GoSearch22, a variation of
the famous and very old Pirrit adware. The malware is said to be aimed
at collecting a lot of personal data and displaying advertising on the
user's screen.
If this first malware is not dangerous,
researchers are however alarmed about the speed shown by hackers to
adapt their software to the new architecture developed by Apple. 'It was
inevitable, compiling for M1 can be as easy as pushing a button in
project settings,' said Thomas Reed, security researcher at
Malwarebytes.
Tony Lambert, another computer security expert
working for the company Red Canary, adds in an interview with Wired that
'current security tools are not yet ready' to detect these new threats
adapted to M1 processors. The number of malware targeting these new
computers should therefore grow rapidly, by the time that antiviruses
also make their transition to the ARM architecture.
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