Malware & Threats

Source Code of $3,000-a-Month macOS Malware ‘Banshee Stealer’ Leaked

The Banshee Stealer macOS malware operation, which emerged earlier this year, was reportedly shut down following a source code leak.

Eduard Kovacs

Published

November 27, 2024

Malware

The cybercriminals behind Banshee Stealer have reportedly shut down their operation after someone leaked the macOS malware’s source code.

Threat intelligence and research project Vx-Underground reported this week that the Banshee Stealer source code was leaked online.

The project said the malware operation has been shut down as a result of the leak. It’s unclear who leaked the code and why.

Vx-Underground has made the Banshee Stealer source code available on its GitHub account.

Banshee Stealer made many headlines in August, after its developers started advertising it on cybercrime forums for a monthly subscription of $3,000.

Believed to have been developed by Russian threat actors, the malware is designed to collect a wide range of data from infected macOS devices, including the user’s OS password, system information, passwords from the keychain, web browser data, and cryptocurrency wallets.

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The targeted cryptocurrency wallets include Exodus, Electrum, Coinomi, Guarda, Wasabi Wallet, Atomic and Ledger.

Banshee Stealer can target data from several browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Edge, Vivaldi, Yandex, Opera, OperaGX, and Safari. It can steal cookies, logins, browsing history, and data from approximately 100 browser plugins.

Banshee Stealer checks the compromised system to ensure that it’s not stealing data from a Russian-speaking user.

It’s unclear how many systems have actually been infected with Banshee Stealer and what methods were used by the attackers to deliver the malware, considering that deploying macOS malware is typically more difficult compared to Windows malware.

Elastic Security Labs, which published its analysis of Banshee Stealer in August, noted at the time that the malware lacked sophisticated obfuscation and the presence of debugging information made it easier to analyze.

However, the company warned that it was still a significant threat that should not be ignored by the cybersecurity community.