This week, Cybereason senior security researcher Amit Serper released a report that identified the company behind OSX.Pirrit, a highly aggressive adware program that has traits usually found in malware, including persistence and the ability to obtain root access.
In an interview with ThreatPost, Serper said that TargetingEdge, the company that created OSX.Pirrit and its variant, "makes a product and their way of monetizing it is by selling ad space on people’s computers without the owner knowing it."
SecurityWeek talked about Serper's initial research on OSX.Pirrit in addition to his latest findings. The site said that the new variant of OSX.Pirrit he analyzed removed the Windows binary found in the original version. The article noted that OSX.Pirrit is just one of the latest threats to target Mac users.
Ars Technica wrote about OSX.Pirrit in an article that talked two other Mac threats that were also disclosed this week. SC Magazine also reported on Serper's research, writing that the updated version of OSX.Pirrit checks a computer for competing programs and removes them.
A story in Softpedia mentions that Serper encountered several dead ends during his research but finally landed a lead when he found what appeared to be a person's name in one of the variant's archives.
Fred O'Connor is Cybereason's senior content writer.