Security researcher Red Canary has discovered a new malware target at Macs running both Intel and M1 chips but there’s a twist: It doesn’t actually do anything.
Macs and viruses aren’t all that common, but the one that was recently discovered by researchers is even less so. Security researcher Red Canary has published information about a new “activity cluster” that has infected 29,139 Macs across more than 150 countries but is missing one key ingredient: a reason to be. In the report, Red Canary and Malwarebytes outline a new strain of macOS malware called Silver Sparrow that affects both Intel and Apple silicon processors. The companies have determined that the sheer scale of the malware is enough to pose “reasonably serious threat” even though it “did not exhibit the behaviors that we’ve come to expect from the usual adware that so often targets macOS systems.
