Little more than a month after I reported that Google’s AI was offering links to malicious scripts, that is happening again, with a slight twist. I’m grateful to Olena of Clario for informing me that there’s a new campaign in progress to deliver AMOS (alias SOMA) stealers to Macs. You can read Vladyslav Kolchin’s account of this in his blog post.
Vladyslav has discovered these in forged Apple-like sites linked from docs.google.com and business.google.com, as well as in articles posted on Medium. I had success in finding the last of those, which appeared at the top of Google’s sponsored results when searching for how to clear cache on macos tahoe .
That took me to Clear Mareks’ stories in medium.com, where there’s the familiar ploy to get us to paste a malicious command into Terminal. On another occasion, you might be presented with a page claiming to be official Apple Support, although it obviously isn’t.
This is almost identical to the previous attack via ChatGPT, and even the base-64 obfuscation is very similar.
This downloaded and ran an AMOS stealer, which unusually didn’t seem too bothered about being run in a locked-down virtual machine.
It immediately started copying the contents of my Documents folder to “FileGrabber”, and wrote several hidden files to the top level of my Home folder, including:
.agent, an AppleScript to run the theft
.mainHelper, the main Mach-O binary
.pass, my password in plain text.
Those appear the same as the version of AMOS delivered using last year’s ChatGPT deception. In addition to seeking access to the Documents folder, the malware asked for access to Notes.
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