Snake, also known as Turla, Uroburos and Agent.BTZ, is a fairly complex malware framework used for targeted attacks, or Cyber-espionage, and it’s been found on the Mac running on MacOS X. In the past Snake has been used to target high-profile individuals and organizations, ranging from Governments, Military and large corporations.
Fox-IT, a Dutch cybersecurity firm, reported Wednesday that it had identified a version of the malicious attack designed to target computers running MacOS. The firm reported that it expects the malware will be used soon against Apple desktops and laptops.
A securelist.com report from Kaspersky Lab suggested the framework has previously been used to hit “several hundred computers in more than 45 countries.” Targets of those malware attacks included government institutions, embassies, military, colleges and universities, researchers and pharmaceutical companies.
Snake has been linked with a Russian cyber-espionage group. Fox-IT has not yet seen the macOS Snake sample ‘in the wild’ and as such, believes that it is probably still in development or testing phases.
However, FoxIT, indicates that Snake authors are likely preparing attacks against Apple users, which is not very surprising since MacBooks are very popular with high-level execs. who are very valuable targets for cyber-espionage.