Malicious Sapphire Sleet curl to osascript Chain With mac-cur User-Agent (via process_creation)

PremiumReviewedSigma · High · v1
Product
macos
Category
process_creation
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-10-14
Updated
2026-10-14

ATT&CK techniques

Execution → C2
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Initial Access

  4. Persistence

  5. Priv Esc

  6. Defense Evasion

  7. Cred Access

  8. Discovery

  9. Lateral Movement

  10. Collection

  11. Exfiltration

  12. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects a curl download piped into osascript while using the distinctive mac-cur user-agent, the staged execution chain Sapphire Sleet uses after a fake software update to fetch and run AppleScript payloads on macOS. Adversaries use this pattern to pull second-stage code and execute it in memory, so the mac-cur marker combined with curl and osascript exposes the intrusion at the download-and-execute stage.

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Malicious Sapphire Sleet curl to osascript Chain With mac-cur User-Agent (via process_creation)
Pivot detection · T1071.001 · 9 related

Detection content is published as a reviewed draft. Tune thresholds and exclusions against your own telemetry before enabling this rule for alerting.