Silver Sparrow

Product Information

The Red Canary team is unclear as to how the virus spread to so many Macs, but noted that it exhibited properties that are common with malicious macOS adware. The Village Voice “Jones is a master and Silver Sparrow is a revelation, alive with meaning and hope.”

We follow two alternate pov’s of a bigamist’s two daughters as one lives their life in secret and the other in ignorance. Though we haven’t observed Silver Sparrow delivering additional malicious payloads yet, its forward-looking M1 chip compatibility, global reach, relatively high infection rate and operational maturity suggest Silver Sparrow is a reasonably serious threat, uniquely positioned to deliver a potentially impactful payload at a moment’s notice,” researchers said in a posting on Thursday. Our initial indication of malicious activity was the PlistBuddy process creating a LaunchAgent, so let’s explore the significance of that. While still a teenager, Dana becomes involved with a young adult man, Marcus McCready, and while her father is displeased he does nothing to stop her as he knows McCready from his married life.I liked the structure of the book; the first half was narrated by Dana, daughter of the second wife, and the second half was narrated by Bunny, daughter of the first wife. As Chaurisse didn't knows that her father was already married, it was pretty interesting to see what she made of things she saw and heard that we knew the cause of. One alternately feels sorry for both Chaurisse and Dana. The second version ( update.pkg MD5: fdd6fb2b1dfe07b0e57d4cbfef9c8149) also included an extraneous Mach-O binary ( tasker MD5: b370191228fef82635e39a137be470af) that was compiled to be compatible with both Intelx86_64 and M1 ARM64. Like before, this binary seems to have been included as a placeholder—this time, displaying the message “You did it!” v2 Image Credit: Jimmy Astle I was disappointed in what I felt was an abrupt ending. I didn't feel closure. I didn't want to close the book and put it down. I felt there was more to be said. In Silver Sparrow, we follow two sisters with different mothers who share the same father. The girls are kept away from each other. They grow up in seemingly similar circumstances, but their father's disparate treatment of them results in different lives for the two of them. When their paths finally intersect, it leads to the unraveling of their father's carefully crafted families.

Dana Lynn Yarboro's parents meet in Atlanta, Georgia when her father is buying an anniversary present for his wife. Her mother, a young divorcée named Gwen Yarboro, becomes James Witherspoon's mistress. Dana is born shortly before the birth of James's daughter Chaurisse, from his marriage to his wife Laverne. After Chaurisse's birth, Gwen pressures James to illegally marry her which he consents to though he does not leave Laverne. Once Silver Sparrow infects a system, the malware just waits for new commands from its operators -- commands that never arrived during the time researchers analyzed it, hoping to learn more of its inner workings prior to releasing their report.In fact, Silver Sparrow is the second malware strain discovered that can run on M1 architectures after the first was discovered just four days before, showing exactly how cutting-edge this new threat really is. Jones beautifully evokes Atlanta in the 1980s while creating gritty, imperfect characters whose pain lingers in the reader’s heart.

Hard on the heels of a macOS adware being recompiled to target Apple’s new in-house processor, researchers have discovered a brand-new family of malware targeting the platform. When James Witherspoon, the owner of a successful limousine service, and Gwendolyn Yarboro have their marriage ceremony in 1969 four months after the birth of their baby Dana, Gwen knows that James already has a wife and an even younger baby. While James, who visits regularly if never often enough, and Gwen, a practical nurse, make sure Dana has every middle-class advantage, Dana grows up aware that her parents’ “marriage” is a secret and that she cannot openly claim her father; James’ devoted stepbrother Raleigh is listed on her birth certificate. Gwen and Dana habitually spy on James’ legitimate wife Laverne and daughter Chaurisse, who live in blissful ignorance of James’s bigamy. By adolescence, Dana, who attends a prestigious magnate high school and wants to attend Mount Holyoke, increasingly resents the plainer, less gifted Chaurisse, whose needs always seem to come first for James. After meeting Chaurisse by accident at a science fair, Dana finds ways for their paths to intersect. When she finally “befriends” Chaurisse, Chaurisse is thrilled that a popular girl likes her enough to visit her at home. Visits happen during hours Dana knows James will not be there. Dana’s adolescent plans, for acceptance as much as revenge, inevitably go awry, but this is less a tragedy than a case of survival and making do. While Dana is at the novel’s center, Jones gives both girls’ points of view, allowing readers to empathize with each of James’s families. Chaurisse may not know about Dana, but she is far from blissful in her ignorance, and her mother Laverne has endured more than her fair share of suffering. James is harder to fathom but also hard to hate. At the heart of it all are the two girls whose lives are at stake, and like the best writers, Jones portrays the fragility of her characers with raw authenticity as they seek love, demand attention, and try to imagine themselves as women. The extent to which that has warped her is palpable as Dana recalls all the times her mum, Gwen, has taken her to spy on – Gwen prefers “surveil” – James’s public family. “We didn’t do damage to anyone but ourselves,” she explains. Still, the knowledge she holds over her half-sister electrifies the novel’s second half, which is narrated by Chaurisse, still unaware of her father’s double life. The girls have by then met at a science fair and become pals, with plain, academically unremarkable Chaurisse eager for some of Dana’s cool to rub off on her. She thinks of Dana as a “silver girl”, popular and smart, likening her to a “Barbie doll dipped in chocolate” when she first sees her. The first version of Silver Sparrow malware ( updater.pkg MD5: 30c9bc7d40454e501c358f77449071aa) that we analyzed contained an extraneous Mach-O binary ( updater MD5: c668003c9c5b1689ba47a431512b03cc), compiled for Intel x86_64 that appeared to play no additional role in the Silver Sparrow execution. Ultimately this binary seems to have been included as placeholder content to give the PKG something to distribute outside the JavaScript execution. It simply says, “Hello, World!” (literally!) v1 Image Credit: Erika NoerenbergmacOS Malware Silver Sparrow Affects About 40,000 Macs Running Both Intel and ARM Chips". CPO Magazine. 2021-03-04. Archived from the original on 2021-03-04 . Retrieved 2021-03-28. While we’ve observed legitimate software doing this, this is the first instance we’ve observed it in malware,” researchers said. “This is a deviation from behavior we usually observe in malicious macOS installers, which generally use preinstall or postinstall scripts to execute commands.” Both versions of Silver Sparrow have an extraneous Mach-O binary that appears to play no additional role in their execution. As we’ll explain in detail in the technical analysis, the Mach-O compiled binaries don’t seem to do all that much—at least not as of this writing—and so we’ve been calling them “bystander binaries.” The following image represents a high-level look at the two versions of Silver Sparrow malware. a b c d e "Silver Sparrow macOS malware with M1 compatibility". Red Canary. 2021-02-18. Archived from the original on 2021-03-25 . Retrieved 2021-03-31.