macOS Bundlore is one of the most popular macOS adware installers. It either comes bundled with pirated applications, or from the web, prompting users to install or update Flash. Though the majority of browsers now have limited support for Flash, it is still a favorite mechanism for infecting systems.
We are asked quite often if deploying the osquery agent is possible via Windows Group Policy Objects (GPOs).
As a part of a pretty crazy week (Microsoft/RDS, Apple/Mojave/High Sierra, Adobe Acrobat/ Flash Player) when it comes to security updates, some new speculative execution vulnerabilities were disclosed and fixed.
[Updated March 11th] This article was written in May 2019 and updated in June 2019. We are updating it again, as CVE-2020-0796 is now public, and has not been patched yet.
CVE-2020-0796 is a remote code execution bug in Microsoft’s SMB (file sharing) server.
Expect attacks targeting this vulnerability soon. Use the queries in this article to find machines with port 445 exposed to the Internet.
Progress in open source projects thrives on the sharing of information. Yet even with the best of intentions, much of the learning can still be considered tribal knowledge, traded between small groups of closely connected individuals. While, the osquery project certainly isn’t immune to this, the community has absolutely benefited from a passionate and growing base of users, developers, contributors and tinkerers that are dedicated to documenting and sharing what they’ve learned.
Osquery, at its most basic level, is an operating system instrumentation framework that exposes the OS as a SQL database. SQL queries can be run to view information about the systems similar to any SQL database, providing a unified cross platform framework (i.e. endpoints running on multiple operating systems can be queried using the industry standard database language: SQL.
This structured approach for collecting and accessing data introduces great flexibility, making it useful for multiple purposes. For example, queries can be constructed to audit infrastructure for compliance, vulnerabilities, malware analysis and intrusion detection, etc. Data collected by osquery can be useful to anybody from IT support teams to CSIRTs. However, in this blog post we’ll narrow our focus and explore how to use osquery specifically for macOS malware analysis (though the methodologies discussed are the same for Windows and Linux operating systems).