Cookies are the keys to the kingdom - In today’s enterprise and consumer environments, Single Sign-On (SSO) and SaaS applications dominate the web landscape. These platforms heavily rely on session cookies to maintain persistent authenticated states across multiple services and domains.

As a result, post-authentication session cookies have become highly valuable targets for attackers. With the proliferation of U2F MFA adversaries are focussing on the user’s browser as a post-compromise foothold seeking to extract cookies and tokens that grant ongoing access to sensitive systems without triggering additional authentication.

As macOS endpoint controls continue to evolve, adversaries are consistently adapting their TTPs to defeat Apple’s ever-changing security frameworks. Although .dmg files remain a popular initial access vector, the traditional “right-click and open” method has become largely ineffective—especially with the security enhancements introduced in macOS Sequoia.

This analysis delves into some contemporary disk-image malware campaigns, their execution primitives and obfuscation techniques.

In the evolving landscape of macOS security, NorthPoleSec’s Santa has earned a solid reputation as a flexible and lightweight endpoint security tool. Originally developed by Google, Santa acts as a binary whitelisting/blacklisting system, but in recent iterations, it also provides incredibly powerful features including file-access authorization. This lesser-known feature is a game-changer for protecting sensitive data on disk, such as session tokens, SSH keys, and browser cookies.

In this post, we’ll take a look at how Santa’s file access authorization mechanism works and how you can configure it to prevent common threat actor behaviors on macOS endpoints.