A tweet from security researcher Patrick Wardle has shed new light on the original attack vector used to spread the Mac spyware Fruitfly to unsuspecting victims more than a decade.
Wardle, the chief research officer at Digita Security and director of research at Synack, said he came across some FBI documents that identify the point of attack as externally facing Mac services with weak passwords, or passwords obtained via third-party breaches.
"The attack vector included the scanning and identification of externally facing services, to include the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP, port 548), RDP or other VNC, SSH (port 22), and Back to my Mac (BTMM), which would be targeted with weak passwords or passwords derived from third-party data breaches," reads an excerpt of the documents included in Wardle’s tweet.