Meta issues hotfix for Muse flaw, calls real‑world risk low
Meta patched the Muse macOS app within hours of the Ars Technica report, and said the attack needed code already running on the user's machine.
Meta has issued a patch for the Muse macOS app after a zero-day that could let an attacker take control of the agent, The Verge reported on Tuesday. The company patched the flaw in the hours after Ars Technica published the researcher Patrick Wardle's account of it.
"This was a local privilege escalation attack, not a remote exploit," David Singleton of Meta Superintelligence Labs said on X, in remarks The Verge quoted. He said the practical risk to users of the Muse Mac app was therefore quite low, and that Meta had issued a hotfix to address the issue.
The bug used an undocumented Muse setting that let local code redirect transcription from Meta's servers to an attacker's endpoint, The Verge said, citing Ars Technica. Proof-of-concept attacks Wardle wrote could take pictures and write files to disk, in many cases without alerting the user.
"At the very least, they should be thinking about security from the very start, and they are just not," Wardle told Ars Technica. Meta emphasised privacy and security when it announced the agent this month, The Verge said. Meta did not answer emailed questions put to it before the Ars Technica report.
Neither Meta nor Wardle has said which versions of the app carry the flaw. Meta's account of the practical risk is its own, and rests on the attack needing local access. The patch is reported here by The Verge alone, and this paper has not seen the fixed app.