Caught in the contagious interview. [Research Saturday]

CyberWire Daily

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4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

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Summary

This week we are joined by Phil Stokes, threat researcher at SentinelOne's SentinelLabs, discussing their work on "macOS FlexibleFerret | Further Variants of DPRK Malware Family Unearthed." Apple recently pushed an update to its XProtect tool, blocking several variants of the DPRK-linked Ferret malware family, which targets victims through the "Contagious Interview" campaign. The malware uses fake job interview processes to trick users into installing malicious software, and new variants, including FlexibleFerret, remain undetected by XProtect. SentinelOne's research reveals a deeper investigation into this malware, which uses social engineering to expand its attack vectors, including targeting developers through platforms like GitHub. The research can be found here: macOS FlexibleFerret | Further Variants of DPRK Malware Family Unearthed Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Cyberwire Network, powered by N2K.
0:09.7	And now a message from Black Cloak.
0:14.8	Did you know the easiest way for cyber criminals to bypass your company's defenses
0:19.0	is by targeting your executives and their families
0:22.2	at home. Black Cloaks award-winning digital executive protection platform secures their personal
0:28.5	devices, home networks, and connected lives. Because when executives are compromised at home,
0:34.6	your company is at risk. In fact, over one-third of new members discover they've already been breached.
0:41.4	Protect your executives and their families 24-7-365 with Black Cloak. Learn more at blackcloak.io. Hello everyone and welcome to the CyberWires Research Saturday.
1:03.3	I'm Dave Bittner, and this is our weekly conversation with researchers and analysts
1:07.8	tracking down the threats and vulnerabilities, solving some of the hard problems and protecting ourselves in a rapidly evolving cyberspace.
1:16.6	Thanks for joining us.
1:21.6	We were actually pivoting off some research that was published in early January on a website
1:31.4	called DMP Dump.
1:33.2	And they described a cross-platform attack chain, which had some macOS components, but they
1:39.8	didn't fully analyze all of it.
1:41.5	So we wanted to jump in there and see what else we could unearth.
1:46.3	That's Phil Stokes, threat researcher at Sentinel One's Sentinel Labs. The research we're
1:51.7	discussing today is titled MacOS Flexible Ferret, further variants of DPRK Malware family unearthed.
2:09.8	Well, describe to us what exactly is flexible ferret?
2:14.4	So, yeah, there's a bit of context there.
2:17.4	It's a little bit of a rabbit hole, just to mix metaphors, but it starts with
2:21.1	this campaign called Contagious Interview, which is a wider tactic of North Korean threat
	...

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