New variant of cross-platform Boonana malware discovered

Graham Cluley
Graham Cluley
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Last week we spoke about the Boonana cross-platform malware, using a malicious Java applet to deliver a cross-platform attack that attempts to download further malware to computers running Windows, Unix and Mac OS X.

Since then some we have seen variants of the original Boonana attack. The samples we have seen have been functionally the same, with the hackers behind them seemingly having obfuscated their code to try and waltz around detection.

Their attempts haven’t been good enough to get past Sophos’s products so far (including our new free anti-virus for Mac home users), and we haven’t had to update our generic detection method.

In the samples we have analysed to date, the attack specifically targets Windows and Mac OS X systems, and just happens to infect other platforms that run Java. Depending upon the flavour of Unix, it doesn’t…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

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