However, there’s nothing to stop a malicious actor from creating an account name that begins with an underscore, too: We can narrow the list down by filtering out all the system accounts by ignoring those that begin with an underscore: Will show you a lot more than just listing the contents of the /Users folder with something like ls, which won’t show you hidden users or those whose home folder is located elsewhere, so be sure to use dscl to get a complete picture.Ī downside of the dscl list command is that it will flood you with perhaps a 100 or more accounts, most of which are used by the system rather than used by console (i.e., login) users. There’s a couple of different ways of doing that, but the most effective is look at the output from dscl, which can show up user accounts that might be hidden from display in the System Preferences app and the login screen.

The first thing you need to know is what user accounts exist on the Mac. For the purposes of this exercise, we’re going to assume that you have access to the command line and to any logs that can be pulled from it. The other thing to consider is whether you have access to the device directly, or only via a command line, or only via logs. The principles remain the same if you have a protected device, and understanding what and where to look will help you use any threat hunting software you may already have more effectively.

Of course, if you have a SentinelOne-protected Mac, for example, you can do a lot of your hunting right there in the management console or by using the remote shell capability, but for the purposes of this post, we’re going to take an unprotected device and see how we can detect any hidden malware on it. How you go about hunting down malware on a macOS endpoint depends a great deal on what access you have to the device and what kind of software is currently running on it. Clearly, just looking for persistence items isn’t sufficient for threat hunting, so in this post we’ll take a deeper dive into how you can hunt for threats on a macOS device. Then there’s the possibility of malware achieving its objectives and cleaning up after itself, effectively aiming to leave without a trace. But persistence is only one element of the kill chain, and some threat actors are known to shun persistence in favor of either one-time infections or a reusable vulnerability to remain stealthy. In our recent post, How Malware Persists on macOS, we discussed the ways that threat actors can ensure that, once they’ve breached a macOS device, their malicious code will survive a logout or device restart.

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