Researchers from cybersecurity company ESET discovered a hitherto completely unknown backdoor in April 2022. the ability to leverage cloud storage such as pCloud, Dropbox or Yandex to collect information from the victimaccess email, log keystrokes and even take screenshots.

this spyware baptized by the computer security team CloudMensis It is a virus developed in Objective-C. one time malware obtained administrator and code execution privileges, received the second stage of the virus through a cloud storage provider, but without using a publicly accessible connection.

This second stage is the feature-packed stage, contains approx. 39 surveillance commandos whose sole purpose is to steal personal information from infected Macs, while also cleaning up the crime scene.

According to the researchers, the first compromised computer was hacked on February 4 of the same year. malware With a new addition to the Mac ecosystem.

How to protect yourself from CloudMensis

really still It is unknown how CloundMensis was distributedbut as a basic security advice: only download apps from trusted sources that you can openly trust, such as the Mac App Store.

According to security company ESET, it seems this is a targeted campaign so you are probably safeand considering that the team does not exploit vulnerabilities zero dayKeeping our Mac up to date seems like a great way to mitigate hacking.

The overall quality of the code and the lack of clutter mean that the authors may not be very familiar with Mac development and not that advanced. However, a lot of resources have been invested in making CloudMensis a powerful spying tool and a threat to potential targets.

According to researcher Marc-Etienne Leveille, it is not the most advanced and powerful virus, but it is capable of posing a threat to infected devices. So if you’re worried about being vulnerable, Turning on Apple’s recently released Lockdown mode will help keep you safehowever, you should remember that experience and fluency will decrease.