Almost all traditional antivirus products want to deeply integrate with the system and affect the performance a lot. Also some of these companies are know to make questionable decisions like trying to intercept HTTPS communication, etc.

The only two I know of is Malwarebytes and Kaspersky.

The former installs with root privileges, runs on boot and cannot be ever closed, despite the fact that it is only an on-demand scanner. I've written to them to request an explanation, and did not get any response.

Kaspersky has had a fair share of rumors against it, and I am not in a position to evaluate if they are trustworthy.

This virus infected Delphi installations, injecting its code and compiling it into a system library. All programs using the infected library contained the virus, including some popular ones.

Because they came straight from the developer, and the virus didn't do anything unless you had Delphi installed they were often considered false positive when they weren't. Originally, it had no malicious payload beside its replication mechanism.

To understand why this happens, it's important to know how massive a typical .pbxproj file looks:

https://opensource.apple.com/source/CommonCrypto/CommonCrypt...

Ostensibly it's human-readable, but because it's generated by Xcode and filled with inscrutable UUIDs, people treat it like a binary file, and they're trained to do so:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2004135/how-to-merge-con...

Even the React Native team apparently allowed the file to be treated as non-diffable for some time: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/pull/11047

And note the large number of commits on all types of projects that essentially say "whoops forgot to update pbxproj" - there are likely far more. https://github.com/search?q=update+pbxproj&type=Commits

So why does this matter? Because the brilliance of this attack is how it "jumps the blood-brain barrier" between a developer's machine and their canonical codebase. Usually, code review and auditing of what goes into a commit prevents this kind of attack from leaping to VCS. But Apple makes the pbxproj so inscrutable, and does such a good job at hiding all its complexity behind (usually well-designed) wizards and dropdown menus, that people take it for granted. If code shows up there, people believe Apple intended that to be the case even if, say, your last commit was a small change in Interface Builder (or whatever they call it nowadays). Your code reviewer might just skip the file entirely, because they've been trained to expect the same.

And that's scary.

At the end of the day, this is just another way of exploiting the lack of a mature and centralized CI ecosystem in the modern package distribution world. There's no organization running a security-minded linter on pbxproj files as a general rule. But, then again, there doesn't need to be a linter on package.json or project.clj or Makefiles because there was never a history of hiding complexity - if that file changes, you'd better darn well know what you're doing. What we have here is a perfect storm of move-fast-break-things package management, a file designed to slip through code reviews, and a pretty creatively designed malware payload.

EDIT: Perhaps another way to look at it is that having one file responsible for both compilation logic and non-compilation-related IDE-specific file status can be problematic. It's like your Makefile also needs to be your .gitignore-but-only-top-level-is-allowed-and-all-files-need-to-be-whitelisted. Of course, this is very much an Apple thing to do.

I'm a bit confused about

>two zero-day exploits: one is used to steal cookies via a flaw in the behavior of Data Vaults, another is used to abuse the development version of Safari.

Malware on the local machine can steal data from Safari on the local machine. Is that a surprise? Does Safari have a threat model that it intends to protect against locally running malware?

  ragulSimpragma/twitterTask
  yimao009/MVC-MVP-MVVM

Inscrutable? It seems like a textual dump of in-memory project structure using UUIDs to represent pointers and links (graph). Yeah, it's a chore to follow manually, but even to me, who has seen this format for the first time ever, it looks rather straightforward. Hasn't anyone written a utility "explorer" of these files?

Eg, if there is a file/directory that only safari is meant to have access to, no other app should be able to read it, without at least bringing up one of the annoying “allow X to access your Y”. For example, the first time you, say, feel your home directory you’ll get a bunch of TCC requests asking if the host app (Terminal.app say) should be allowed to access those files.

Interestingly it's happened to Xcode before, and an impressive number of bad apps made it to the App Store as a result. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XcodeGhost.