T1546.006: LC_LOAD_DYLIB Addition

View on MITRE ATT&CK T1546.006
Tactic(s) Privilege Escalation, Persistence

Data from MITRE ATT&CK®:

Adversaries may establish persistence by executing malicious content triggered by the execution of tainted binaries. Mach-O binaries have a series of headers that are used to perform certain operations when a binary is loaded. The LC_LOAD_DYLIB header in a Mach-O binary tells macOS and OS X which dynamic libraries (dylibs) to load during execution time. These can be added ad-hoc to the compiled binary as long as adjustments are made to the rest of the fields and dependencies.(Citation: Writing Bad Malware for OSX) There are tools available to perform these changes.

Adversaries may modify Mach-O binary headers to load and execute malicious dylibs every time the binary is executed. Although any changes will invalidate digital signatures on binaries because the binary is being modified, this can be remediated by simply removing the LC_CODE_SIGNATURE command from the binary so that the signature isn’t checked at load time.(Citation: Malware Persistence on OS X)

© 2024 The MITRE Corporation. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of The MITRE Corporation.

Cyber Threat Graph Context

Explore how this ATT&CK Technique relates to the wider threat graph

Mitigations for this technique

MITRE ATT&CK Mitigations

How to detect this technique

MITRE ATT&CK Data Components

SP800-53 Controls

See which controls can help protect against this MITRE ATT&CK technique. This is based on mappings to associated SP800-53 controls produced by the MITRE Engenuity Center for Threat-Informed Defense.