This week at Black Hat, Mac malware expert Patrick Wardle will describe how he used a custom-built command and control server to analyze new spying capabilities in a variant of the FruitFly backdoor.

Patrick Wardle of Synack and the Objective-See blog talks to Mike Mimoso about the emergence of a ransomware service targeting MacOS machines. Wardle explains why he characterizes MacRansom as “lame” and whether this could kick off a wave of copycats vying for the Apple platform.

A new, free macOS-based ransomware as a service has surfaced on the darkweb. Researchers say once the malware encrypts users’ files, they’re “pretty much gone for good.”

The open source HandBrake project is warning anyone who recently downloaded the Mac version of the software that they’re likely infected with malware.

Cybercriminals have developed macro malware for the macOS, the first time this technique has been spotted on the Apple platform.

Mac security researcher Patrick Wardle released a tool called OverSight that monitors when malware may be recording a webcam or audio session on a macOS machine.

Admittedly, the payouts for Apple’s bug bounty announced last week at Black Hat drew mixed reactions ranging from reasonable to raucously funny. Apple made a big splash at the annual hacker conference, first via a last-minute announcement that well-regarded Ivan Krstic would be giving a talk on some of the inner workings of iOS 10...

While most of the discussion around ransomware is rightly so about the unabated stampede of new strains and variations on existing samples, relatively little discourse focuses on detection beyond antivirus and intrusion prevention systems. Some generic ransomware detection systems for Windows and OS X exist, but many of those are signature-based or have other limitations...

Trusted Mac OS X firewall Little Snitch is vulnerable to local privilege escalation attacks that could give criminals the ability plant rootkits and keyloggers on some El Capitan systems. The Little Snitch firewall vulnerability was found by Synack Director of Research and well-known OS X hacker Patrick Wardle. Affected are 3.x versions of the Little...

At last week’s Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple announced some security upgrades around Gatekeeper and a new filesystem that includes native support for encryption. Mac hacker Patrick Wardle, director of research at Synack, explains whether this a big deal and how the upgrades address some problems he’d disclosed to Apple. Download: Patrick_Wardle_on_MacOS_Gatekeeper_Security.mp3 Music by Chris Gonsalves