A Mac user (Reddit u/UntilHEX) reported that Anthropic's Claude Code found an unauthorized XMRig cryptominer while helping build a temperature-monitoring app. Abnormally high sensor readings led the assistant to inspect running processes and identify XMRig as the cause of roughly 1,175% CPU use, or nearly 12 saturated cores. The finding i…
Unit 42 analyzed an Atomic macOS (AMOS) stealer infection generated in a lab on Aug. 5, 2026, starting from a fake "macOS toolkit" instruction page hosted at getmacouscloud.com. The page tells victims to paste a command into Terminal, a ClickFix-style copy/paste technique, which downloads a Zsh script and then installs a Mach-O AMOS paylo…
Objective-See analyzed Heartbreaker, a previously unknown macOS ransomware sample (ad hoc-signed ARM64 Mach-O written in Rust). It was uploaded to VirusTotal in May 2025 and remains undetected by all AV engines. It was found by researcher Megan Carney. It encrypts files in ~/Downloads with AES-256-GCM, renames them to .heartbreaker, drops…
Researchers at SafeDep analyzed a macOS implant recovered from a compromised workstation. Infection began on 2026-07-26 with a paid YouTube video ad impersonating TradingView that led to a fake .pkg installer. The malware is a remote-controlled task runner, not a single-purpose stealer. It persists via a LaunchAgent that re-fetches a shel…
Kaspersky researchers describe a new MacSync macOS infostealer variant, first seen in the wild in September 2026, that replaces the earlier AppleScript-based droppers with FAT Mach-O binaries written in Objective-C and Swift. MacSync is sold as malware-as-a-service, so delivery varies by operator. In this campaign it spread through malici…
This SentinelOne weekly roundup (Week 39, 2026) covers one law enforcement success and two active threat campaigns. A US court sentenced Armenian national Karen Serobovich Vardanyan ("Maneeken"/"Karl Lagerfeld"), an initial access specialist for Ryuk ransomware, to two years in prison and over $1.2 million in restitution. SentinelLABS ide…
A ClickFix malvertising campaign uses sponsored Google results for "amazon business" to lure victims to a fake Amazon login page on Google Sites and then to a fake CAPTCHA. The CAPTCHA pastejacks a command into the clipboard that the victim is told to run in the Windows Run box. The command abuses the legacy finger.exe utility to fetch a …
Kaspersky researchers report that the APT group Mirage Kitten has moved from native C/C++/Go malware to Node.js and JavaScript implants, NodeRabbit and PollCat. Both are cross-platform RATs delivered through spear-phishing by fake recruiters on LinkedIn and other job platforms, using trojanized coding-challenge archives hosted on Amazon S…
Elastic Security Labs is tracking REF8801, a campaign in which a fake Web3 venture capital accelerator, Apex Accelerator (Apex Foundation), targets cryptocurrency startups and founders with malicious npm packages. The packages, @apexacc/cli and @apexacc/audit, pose as an AI advisor and an MCP-based security scanner, with offers of free Cl…