Hooray, hot-fixed! ๐ Kudos on the quick patch (& full disclosure FTW) ๐๐ฝ
But there was a 'remote' exploit vector: a simple ClickFix attack could deliver the hijack giving a *remote* attacker complete access then to every victim device running Muse
See:
We appreciate this report and have issued a hotfix to the Muse Mac app. This was a local privilege escalation attack, not a remote exploit. Using it to do harm therefore requires malicious code already running on the userโs machine under their user account and the practical risk to users of the Muse Mac app was therefore quite low. Nonetheless, we have issued a hotfix to the app to address the issue.
We take every report of a possible security problem very seriously, including those that arrive as published exploit code (like this one). We strive to be extremely transparent about privacy and security in Muse as we know this is important to maintain your trust. Therefore, hereโs a little more detail on this issue:
- Muse's dictation is powered by a server-side speech model. The app shipped with an internal setting that allows the endpoint used by this feature to be redirected to a different URL, which is useful during debugging and development.
- The setting lives in the app's local preferences, which macOS allows any program running under your user account to modify. Changing this requires malicious code already running on your Mac. This is not remotely exploitable, and it does not involve Muse's servers or the Secure VM that isolates agent tasks.
- Overriding this setting would let an attacker proxy audio dictation requests and capture the access tokens the Muse app uses to drive the Muse agent โ expanding malware already present on your computer into the Muse agent. Our hotfix removes the endpoint setting from production builds entirely, which closes this vulnerability.
- We are grateful for the work of the security research community and potential security issues can be responsibly disclosed via our bug bounty program, which pays up to $300,000 for exactly this class of finding.
And once a Mac is exploited, you can interact with any of the users "connected" devices also running Muse.
...meaning you remotely task their mobile (iOS) Muse client ...invisibly ๐ฒ๐๐
What can you do? Welll, some very neat iOS stuff!
Please don't install - it's trivial to turn Muse into the ultimate backdoor ๐๐
Ya, as an AI assistant built to manage your Mac, Muse needs broad access to your digital life.
But serious 0-day flaw(s) can let local malware/attackers invisibly hijack it.
Let me show you. ๐งต
New blog post: Living Inside the Shell: zsh Modules on macOS
zsh is much more than a command interpreter. Through its module system, the shell can perform operations that defenders often associate with separate binaries: establish TCP connections, manipulate files, access extended attributes, and more.
That creates an interesting detection problem. If your logic mainly looks for tools such as curl, wget, nc, xattr, or rm, or relies heavily on child-process creation, you may only detect one implementation of the behavior.
In the post, I look at zsh/net/tcp, zsh/mapfile, and zsh/attr, including a second-stage script executed directly from a socket without first being written to disk.
From a DFIR perspective, the interesting part is what still remains visible. Using Apple Endpoint Security telemetry, I show that avoiding the usual utility does not necessarily hide the underlying action.
Endpoint Security arrives in the iPhone kernelcache as a kext. (iOS 27.2 beta)
+
+ /usr/lib/libEndpointSecurity.dylib
"An Endpoint Security product on the system denied the process from executing."
ES on iOS? ๐