Mac espionage trojan targets Uighur activists
Researchers at Kaspersky Lab said Friday that they have come across a new "advanced persistent threat (APT)" campaign targeting Uighur activists who use Mac OS X.
The backdoor, dubbed MaControl.b, is being used to spy on Uighur dissidents. On Wednesday, researchers said they discovered the "new wave" of APT attacks targeting the Turkik-speaking Muslim group, which mostly lives in the northwest Chinese province of Xinjiang.
The attackers are sending their prospective victims legitimate looking emails that contain a difficult-to-detect exploit disguised in a ZIP file, which is attached. "When executed, it installs itself in the system and connects to its command-and-control server to get instructions," wrote Costin Raiu, a senior security researcher at Kaspersky, in a blog post. "The backdoor allows its operator to list files, transfer files and generally run commands on the infected machine."
