Silver Sparrow

Product Information

Among the most impressive things about Silver Sparrow is the number of Macs it has infected. Red Canary researchers worked with their counterparts at Malwarebytes, with the latter group finding Silver Sparrow installed on 29,139 macOS endpoints as of Wednesday. That’s a significant achievement. Dana, the first narrator, is the daughter who knows. She's also the secret daughter, the one who lives in shame and has to watch her mom mooning after this man who doesn't even live with them. Her only consolation is that she's the "pretty" one, but pretty doesn't make up for not feeling loved, and as she watches Chaurisse, she becomes obsessed with this sister who doesn't know she exists, to the point where she starts finding excuses to be where she is. The missile uses its INS/GPS for conducting its midcourse trajectory. Homing, up to target destruction, is performed by using its scene-matching technology or Anti-Radiation capability, overcoming any GPS jamming scenario. 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 Noerenberg 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.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. Jones herself is a child of a second marriage, although “there is no scandal there,” she clarifies. “My father is not a bigamist. But I also say to people, ‘My father is not a bigamist that I know of. Just as your father is not a bigamist that you know of.’ That’s part of the mystery of fatherhood.” She has two sisters, but they lived “600 miles away”, while Jones grew up with their father. “I’ve always wondered what their lives were like; what they thought of me; what they thought of the family that I grew up in,” Jones says. “I wrote Silver Sparrow as a gift to my sisters.” While tools like osquery and antimalware controls have excellent visibility into the contents of LaunchAgents, some endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools have a hard time gaining visibility into LaunchAgents. EDR tooling tends to rely on process monitoring that offers a great deal of visibility into the creation—but not necessarily the contents—of a file. For example, an EDR tool might offer you the following shell command: cp /Volumes/TotesLegit.app/Resources/launcher.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents/launcher.plistJones beautifully evokes Atlanta in the 1980s while creating gritty, imperfect characters whose pain lingers in the reader’s heart. 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.

The story is narrated from the points of view of the 2 daughters, which I feel was the perfect mechanism for telling this story. As I came to know both Dana and Chaurisse, and began to understand the impact of their parents’ actions on them — physically, mentally, emotionally — I couldn’t help feeling deeply for them. For two teenagers to have to deal with not just a situation that neither of them chose, but also the fallout from it that changes their lives forever, it really made me detest the adults in their lives for their actions (and inactions). Of course, the character I hated the most in this story was the father, James Witherspoon — not just because of his cheating on his wife (which, as it turns out, was probably the least of his aggressions), but because the way he handled the entire situation, he repeatedly caused pain to both his families, which I found to be deplorable. The worst part was James’s nonchalant attitude toward the whole thing — it made me mad how he would constantly assert that he was “doing the best he could” and the fact that he agreed to “own up to his mistake” by providing for Gwen and Dana (as opposed to abandoning them, I suppose) should absolve him of all wrongdoing. But of course, it’s not that simple, as it becomes obvious from the way James treats Gwen and Dana throughout the entire story that he is exasperated with them, at times even making himself out to be the victim rather than the person who created this whole mess to begin with. Some may argue that James is a “flawed” man who made some mistakes, but since he did try to rectify them, he should at least be given some credit for that – while that may be true to some extent and perhaps in other circumstances, I might be more sympathetic, but the James Witherspoon presented as he was in this story made me feel nothing but disdain for him. Once fully executed, Silver Sparrow leaves two scripts on an infected disk: /tmp/agent.sh and ~/Library/Application Support/verx_updater/verx.sh.

Next, we don’t know the circumstances under which ~/Library/._insu appears. This file may be part of a toolset the adversary wishes to avoid; it may be part of the malware’s life cycle itself as a way of removing components after an objective has been met. Dana’s narration is heartbreaking. Tayari Jones does a fantastic job of character development. My heart broke for Dana. What pressure to put on a little girl. Dana’s mom Gwen is a bit murky. She is a character who is difficult to understand in that she knew he was married when she began the affair; yet she is a devoted momma. She works hard and does all she can do to help Dana make the best of her life and her future. That remains to be seen, but “this is significant because the M1 ARM64 architecture is young, and researchers have uncovered very few threats for the new platform,” researchers noted. Now, I can't believe that because you know.. the look of him.. he don't look like doodely squat with them big ole' Coke bottle glasses and he's short!" Silver Sparrow revolves around Dana Lynn Yarboro and Chaurisse Witherspoon, who are half-sisters, although only Dana knows this.

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 her final year of high school Dana is introduced to her paternal grandmother, Bunny Witherspoon, as she is dying. Her grandmother bequeaths her her favourite brooch as a parting gift. macOS 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. 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.

And while the story focuses on the two daughters, I'm not sure I really grasped the point of it. The narrative feels cohesive, but ultimately leading nowhere. And when it finally gets to the crux of the matter, it ends abruptly without really resolving anything. And maybe that is the point of it, that there is no resolution to such a complex set of issues, but that's not very satisfying to me as a reader. The ultimate goal of this malware is a mystery,” researchers said. “We have no way of knowing with certainty what payload would be distributed by the malware, if a payload has already been delivered and removed, or if the adversary has a future timeline for distribution.” An Apple spokesperson provided a comment on the condition they not be named and the comment not be quoted. The statement said that after finding the malware, Apple revoked the developer certificates. Apple also noted there's no evidence of a malicious payload being delivered. Last, the company said it provides a variety of hardware and software protections and software updates and that the Mac App Store is the safest venue to obtain macOS software.Bunny Chaurisse Witherspoon grows up the protected and beloved daughter of James Witherspoon and Laverne Witherspoon. Her parents met at the age of 14 when her mother lost her virginity to her father and subsequently became pregnant and was forced to marry James and leave school. Their son was a stillborn but Laverne remained with the Witherspoons. They managed to claw their way to being middle-class business owners with James and his brother Raleigh running a chauffeur business and Laverne running a beauty salon out of their garage. And then Jones gives Bunny Chaurisse Witherspoon her narration. Chaurisse begins her narration telling the reader that her story begins with her mother, Laverne, marring James Witherspoon at age fourteen years old. James and Laverne were babies when they got married, thrown into the adult world. Laverne and James struggled through adolescence with an unexpected and unintended pregnancy. Laverne is a sympathetic character, a woman who had to grow up too fast. She too is a devoted mother. James, in his duplicity, is not a likable character, although Jones doesn’t write him as truly evil, more hapless, and a bit shifty. Jones writes him as a complicated character who loves both of his daughters.