Launched in November, the Apple M1 is the first ARM-based silicon designed by Apple, which is now the central processing unit for its Mac devices. “Today, we highlighted the fact that malware authors have now joined the ranks of developers …(re)compiling their code to ARM64 to gain natively binary compatibility with Apple’s latest hardware.” What is the Apple M1 SoC? “Apple’s new M1 systems offer a myriad of benefits, and natively compiled ARM64 code runs blazingly fast,” said Apple-specializing researcher Patrick Wardle, who discovered the application, on Wednesday. Apple has since revoked the certificate for the malicious application. Mac-targeting adware, which displays pesky advertisements on user computers, is a prevalent and continuous threat for Apple devices. The application downloads a variant of Pirrit, which is a type of adware. The main differentiator here is that the application includes code tailored to run on ARM-based M1 processors – rather than only the Intel x86 processors previously utilized by Apple. The recently uncovered malicious application, called GoSearch22, natively runs on M1 - meaning that it executes software written for M1-powered devices’ natural, basic mode of operation.
