A newly uncovered cyber campaign is targeting Web3 professionals with sophisticated social engineering, leveraging fake job interviews to deploy cross-platform infostealer malware designed to harvest crypto wallets, credentials, and sensitive system data.
The attack begins with threat actors impersonating recruiters who approach job seekers with interview opportunities.
Victims are directed to a malicious domain, relay.lc, which masquerades as an AI-powered platform branded as “Relay.”
The site promotes typical enterprise collaboration features such as real-time transcription and AI summaries, making the workflow appear legitimate for remote hiring processes.
Download links are provided for both Windows and macOS systems, initiating the infection chain.
Technical analysis reveals that both platform-specific installers are heavily weaponized, despite presenting benign user interfaces. On macOS, the downloaded Relay.dmg lacks any legitimate .app bundle.
Instead, it contains a hidden executable stored in a non-visible directory (.back). Users are instructed to execute a script via Terminal, which copies the payload into the /tmp directory, removes macOS quarantine attributes using xattr -c, assigns execution permissions, and silently launches the malware in the background.
This approach effectively bypasses native macOS security prompts without exploiting any system vulnerability.
Once executed, the macOS payload initiates credential harvesting through deceptive AppleScript dialogs that mimic system authentication prompts.
Victims are asked to input their system password under the pretense of compatibility issues. Simultaneously, the malware extracts the macOS login Keychain database (~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain-db) and prepares both the password and encrypted credential store for exfiltration.