380. Hunting for Suspicious System Language Discovery Events

Hello everyone!

Sometimes, even if a victim runs a malicious file, the system may still avoid compromise. One reason for this is the use of the System Location Discovery: System Language Discovery (T1614.001) technique.

The point is that in some cases attackers do not want their malware to run on systems located in certain countries. Today we’ll look at an example of how attackers restrict the download of a stealer for systems that may be located in CIS countries.

So, the loader for the SHub stealer targeting macOS used the following command to obtain information about the language of the compromised system:

defaults read ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.HIToolbox.plist AppleEnabledInputSources 2>/dev/null | grep -qi russian

The AppleEnabledInputSources key in the com.apple.HIToolbox.plist file contains information about keyboard layouts. Its contents are checked for the presence of the Russian language, which is typical for CIS systems.

A good detection opportunity is suspicious events involving reads of this key, for example:

event_type: "processcreatemac"

AND

proc_file_path: "defaults"

AND

cmdline: ("read" AND "appleenabledinputsources")

See you soon!

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