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1. #MALWARE USED RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS TO AVOID SOFTWARE#
2. #MALWARE USED RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS TO AVOID CODE#
3. #MALWARE USED RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS TO AVOID DOWNLOAD#
4. #MALWARE USED RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS TO AVOID MAC#

Apple sees no need any more to build AppleScript support into its own apps – something which would have been unconscionable just a few years ago (thanks largely to Sal).ĭevelopers and advanced users still need a scripting system, and with all those wonderful hooks in place through most of Apple’s own apps, it would be crazy just to abandon automation. You’ll find them near-empty, and vestigial. If you’re looking for even clearer writing on the wall, try opening the scripting dictionaries of Apple’s most recent tools, such as Console 1.0. Apple’s solution, I’m afraid, is for Sal to leave, and further AppleScript development to be terminated. As Apple integrates macOS and iOS more tightly and limits what apps can do in macOS, AppleScript has become a problem. It has therefore remained confined to the more liberal regime of OS X and (just) macOS. Its unpopularity with most programmers is probably the factor which has ensured that it has not been exploited to any degree. Devised in a completely different threat landscape, AppleScript has no concept of entitlements or sandboxes, and could be abused to cause great damage. The biggest issues with AppleScript are now those of security and iOS support. Unfortunately, coding an AppleScriptObjC app is considerably harder than writing plain AppleScript, and precious few developers seem interested in using it. Instead of equipping AppleScript with better tools to support the user interface, it became semi-integrated into the Xcode SDK, first with AppleScript Studio, then AppleScriptObjC. Strangely it has here been eclipsed by the other automation tools for which Sal was responsible, including Automator and Apple Configurator. Somehow – and I strongly suspect that a lot of that somehow was Sal Soghoian – AppleScript survived the great purge of Classic MacOS features, and made it into OS X.

#MALWARE USED RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS TO AVOID MAC#

The IBM-built Network Server 500 and 700 were driven by Mac apps written largely in AppleScript, businesses were built on commercial apps which were cunningly integrated using AppleScript, and a superb rapid app development tool (Facespan) appeared to help its users write their own apps and tools. But for those who immersed themselves, it proved anything but a toy. Many advanced users saw it as being programming, and did their utmost to avoid it. Most diehard programmers saw it as a verbose toy, which did some things impressively easily, but a lot of other things rather poorly. All it needed was a scripting language, hence the birth of AppleScript.Īs a programming language, it was a partial success. By providing hooks into those events, it became possible for other apps to control them. Classic Mac apps – just like macOS ones – were event-driven. But it is not the end of scripting for macOS, and should open new and even more exciting possibilities.ĪppleScript was introduced as one of the many major changes in System 7, which marked the Mac’s coming of age. The departure this week of the great Sal Soghoian, who has led Apple’s Automation Technologies and scripting systems for the last 19 of those years, marks the end of an era, and the end of AppleScript as we have known, occasionally cursed, and always loved it dearly.

#MALWARE USED RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS TO AVOID CODE#

Since "run-only" AppleScript come in a compiled state where the source code isn't human-readable, this made analysis harder for security researchers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.After 25 years, Apple is about to kill AppleScript.

#MALWARE USED RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS TO AVOID DOWNLOAD#

As users installed the pirated software, the boobytrapped installers would download and run a run-only AppleScript, which would download and run a second run-only AppleScript, and then another final third run-only AppleScript.

The primary reason was that security researchers weren't able to retrieve the malware's entire code at the time, which used nested run-only AppleScript files to retrieve its malicious code across different stages. But their reports only scratched the surface of what OSAMiner was capable of, SentinelOne macOS malware researcher Phil Stokes said yesterday.

SentinelOne said that two Chinese security firms spotted and analyzed older versions of the OSAMiner in August and September 2018, respectively. But the cryptominer did not go entirely unnoticed.

#MALWARE USED RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS TO AVOID SOFTWARE#

Named OSAMiner, the malware has been distributed in the wild since at least 2015 disguised in pirated (cracked) games and software such as League of Legends and Microsoft Office for Mac, security firm SentinelOne said in a report published this week.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: For more than five years, macOS users have been the targets of a sneaky malware operation that used a clever trick to avoid detection and hijacked the hardware resources of infected users to mine cryptocurrency behind their backs.