Conference:  Defcon 31

Authors: Patrick Wardle Objective-See Foundation

2023-08-01

As the majority of malware contains networking capabilities, it is well understood that detecting unauthorized network access is a powerful detection heuristic. However, while the concepts of network traffic analysis and monitoring to detect malicious code are well established and widely implemented on platforms such as Windows, there remains a dearth of such capabilities on macOS. This talk aims to remedy this situation by delving deeply into a myriad of programmatic approaches capable of enumerating network state, statistics, and traffic, directly on a macOS host. We will showcase open-source implementations of relatively overlooked low-level APIs, private frameworks, and user-mode extensions that provide insight into all networking activity. And, by leveraging these techniques, you will learn how to efficiently and generically detect both known and unknown threats targeting macOS!