Meta’s Muse has a serious 0-day

(arstechnica.com)

121 points | by pavel_lishin a day ago ago

54 comments

  • gavinray a day ago ago

    The "zero day" is something they call a "ClickFix Attack"

    Upon Googling "ClickFix":

      > "A ClickFix attack is a social engineering technique... It typically compromises devices by manipulating victims into copying and pasting malicious commands directly into system-level tools"
    
    I'm sorry, that's not a zero-day, that's idiocy that's as old as time.
    • bachittle a day ago ago

      The exploit is a local zero day exploit, meaning the machine needs to already be compromised. For it to be a remote zero day exploit you need to do the ClickFix attack. The idea is that it lets you access much more machines and resources if the one machine with Muse is compromised. More info here: https://x.com/dps/status/2102248329111634067

    • failbuffer a day ago ago

      We filed a bug report but the original maintainer seems to have dropped offline. The community's had some success in correcting bugs with low-level hacking, but it's hard to make progress without the source code.

    • dspillett a day ago ago

      > > It typically compromises devices by manipulating victims into copying and pasting malicious commands

      > […] that's idiocy that's as old as time.

      And constantly being reinvented: `curl -sL some.unverified.stuff.sh | bash`

    • bigfishrunning a day ago ago

      Reminds me of playing Runescape back in the late 90s, you could double your money by just pressing alt-F4

    • analog31 a day ago ago

      Well if nothing else, idiocy that's as old as time started on day zero.

    • theultdev a day ago ago

      words don't seem to mean anything anymore.

      clickbait headline should be changed, not a 0-day.

  • willtemperley a day ago ago

    Who in their right mind would install a Meta AI with near admin privileges?

    • josefresco a day ago ago

      "Normies" aka the average user on Meta. They have no concept of what "admin privileges" means and don't really care. I still have a hard time convincing my clients to use secure passwords. I have clients who were phished for substantial amounts of money and STILL don't implement proper security measures.

      • a day ago ago
        [deleted]
    • sandeepkd a day ago ago

      Almost everyone who is struggling with AI insecurity and is afraid of being left behind

      • shimman a day ago ago

        No, most workers don't really say this in surveys and polling. They tend to hate LLM tools because it makes their jobs worse, nothing about being left behind.

        The only people pushing the "left behind" narrative is SV + SF + VC since their previous narratives have failed to persuade the public (thank fuck).

        • dgellow a day ago ago

          I’m pretty sure you misread the comment you responded to

    • mattbrewsbytes a day ago ago

      This is kinda the reason why the Meta stock might be pumping and Muse might leap ahead other AI solutions as far as market share goes. Quoted from Prof G Markets podcast: "meta has been molesting your privacy for 10 years".

      It stands to reason their daily active users just don't care, they are already sharing so much on Meta's platforms it won't matter to them.

    • imagetic a day ago ago

      We all fear the true answer to that question.

    • apazzolini a day ago ago

      > Who in their right mind would install a Meta AI

      I fixed it for ya

    • jsbisviewtiful a day ago ago

      Normally I’m not one to blame the victims but, uh, yeah who in the world is dumb enough to trust Meta at this point?

    • snapcaster a day ago ago

      almost every normal person

    • john_strinlai a day ago ago

      most people don't know or care what "admin privileges" even means, or why they wouldn't want ai to have them

    • sick_of_slop a day ago ago

      “They trust me, dumb fucks”.

      • alex1138 a day ago ago

        And before this gets flagged or downvoted or "he was young" or "he was joking" or "he was making a point: he was saying 'I could be anyone', not that he can't be trusted" answer me what other tech people say this, ever, along with all the other charges ("I'm going to fuck them [the Winklevoss twins] in the ear", "You can be unethical and legal and that's how i live my life haha", hacking Crimson reporters, and that's just at Harvard, let alone when Facebook became available to the public

        • matroxmemories a day ago ago

          Honestly, a lot of people start using this line of humor when their peers do. Add in that he was young, and this was before people’s private messages being released easily to the masses was common, Im not really surprised.

          • bigfishrunning a day ago ago

            > people’s private messages being released easily to the masses was common, Im not really surprised.

            He, personally, did a lot to enable this reality.

        • cindyllm a day ago ago

          [dead]

        • alex1138 a day ago ago

          [flagged]

  • yalok a day ago ago

    > macOS has long provided a simple means for apps to handle dictation and transcription in processes that stay securely on the device

    Not sure these guys realize that the quality and latency of those Apple services in MacOS is way lower than SOTA and not too many people use them because of that…

  • sippingabonedry a day ago ago

    Maybe they should have spent the money used to buy its stupid name from a band on additional testing instead.

    • NDlurker a day ago ago

      Why would they pay Muse? Muse the band doesn't have a monopoly on the word muse

      • dylan604 a day ago ago

        because they had control of the handles used on Meta's apps. Why is that hard to understand. I was shocked they paid them instead of just taking it.

        • NDlurker 7 hours ago ago

          I thought you were talking about trademarks, not user names

    • axus a day ago ago

      Did the band end up getting money for that?

      • echelon a day ago ago

        Presumably. They changed their handle on non-Meta social networks to match at around the same time as the Meta handle change.

  • corvad a day ago ago

    Click-bait title huh. This is not even close to a 0-day. I guess that word has lost all meaning to ArsTechnica huh.

    • TiredOfLife a day ago ago

      ars and the register have always been closer to the onion than journalism

  • il a day ago ago

    How is this a serious zero day if it requires local code execution to run?

  • tw600040 a day ago ago

    People are giving Meta access to their emails, messages and calendars and other apps? Are they out of their mind or what am I missing?

    • nzoschke a day ago ago

      People are both lazy and curious. Meta is an attention grabbing juggernaut. Put the two together and plenty of people will experiment with giving Meta / Muse access to more of their digital lives.

      It's scary to think how the hyperscalers will continue to get more and more access into everyones tools and lives under the guise of "AI assistant".

    • dmix a day ago ago

      They also give them to Google in Gmail

      • tw600040 a day ago ago

        Gmail is 1 part of the puzzle. A big part but still one part. But when you give something access to your email, calendar, iMessage, browser, passkeys of other apps, location it can autocomplete the missing parts and can pretty much complete the jigsaw.

        • dmix a day ago ago

          I would never run Grok Bot or Muse with any sort of authentication.

          I did try booking a flight with Muse and it worked surprisingly well. But I never used it after.

  • adamsb6 a day ago ago

    Is 12 hours to deliver a local privilege escalation fix not a good response time?

  • peri-cl a day ago ago

    I'm confused what the vulnerability is. Does macOS have some specific function for protecting key material, that it's unexpected that if you execute user-privileged code locally, outside of a sandbox, it gets full read access?

    • voxic11 a day ago ago

      Yeah macOS security is capability based rather than purely identity based. So if you don't pass the required entitlements to an application then it cannot do stuff like read from the system keychain even if its running as your user.

  • chews a day ago ago

    I love that when you open a web inspection console on facebook, it says "Stop! This is a browser feature intended for developers. If someone told you to copy-paste something here to enable a Facebook feature or "hack" someone's account, it's a scam and will give them access to your Facebook account. See https://www.facebook.com/selfxss for more information."

    • dylan604 a day ago ago

      I've used the devtools for years now, but for whatever reason, it never occurred to me to try and format the text like that. Too bad that that message is not clean as there were plenty of other things in the console so that I actually had to scroll around to find it. Had someone asked me to open the console and do something, I would not have seen the message.

  • SoftTalker a day ago ago

    A zero day? Of course it does. It likely has many. Given the history of software, it's impossible to think it wouldn't.

    • tcdent a day ago ago

      You would think a website dedicated to talking about software engineering would agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly.

      • dgellow a day ago ago

        A zero day generally means a vulnerability and associated exploit have been identified and the vendor didn’t yet provide a patch. It doesn’t just mean “there is a vulnerability”. To say that every software has vulnerabilities is just not a useful comment

        • Caracas288 a day ago ago

          The difference between

          "We found aliens!"

          And

          "Aliens are out there!"

    • dpoloncsak a day ago ago

      It's a zero day that has been released to the public with full exploit code.

      You're missing the important part there.