Meta’s Muse has a serious 0-day | Hacker News Reader

Meta’s Muse has a serious 0-day

arstechnica.com

122 pointspavel_lishin49 comments

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.

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.

words don't seem to mean anything anymore.

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

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

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

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

> > 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`

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

We all fear the true answer to that question.

almost every normal person

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?

Billions of people

Sad, yet true

“They trust me, dumb fucks”.

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

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.

> 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.

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

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

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).

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

"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.

> Who in their right mind would install a Meta AI

I fixed it for ya

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.

> 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…

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

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

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

Did the band end up getting money for that?

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

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

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.

I thought you were talking about trademarks, not user names

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

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."

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.

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?

They also give them to Google in Gmail

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.

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.

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".

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

The difference between

"We found aliens!"

And

"Aliens are out there!"

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

You're missing the important part there.

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