GoKawiilA new campaign delivering the Atomic Stealer malware to macOS users abuses the Script Editor in a variation of the ClickFix attack that tricked users into executing commands in Terminal.
Script Editor is a built-in macOS application for writing and running scripts, primarily AppleScript and JXA, that can execute local scripts and shell commands. It is a trusted application pre-installed on macOS systems.
While this is not the first time it has been abused for malware delivery, the researchers note that, in the context of the ClickFix social engineering technique, it does not require the victim to manually interact with the Terminal and execute commands.
Apart from the Terminal-based variant being widely reported, macOS Tahoe 26.4 added protection against ClickFix attacks in the form of a warning when trying to execute commands.
In a new campaign distributing Atomic Stealer observed by security researchers at Jamf, the hackers target victims with fake Apple-themed sites that pose as guides to help reclaim disk space on their Mac computers.
These pages contain legitimate-looking system cleanup instructions but use the applescript:// URL scheme to launch Script Editor with a pre-filled executable code.
Prompt to open the Script Editor by the malicious web page
Source: Jamf
The malicious code runs an obfuscated ‘curl | zsh’ command, which downloads and executes a script directly in system memory.
This decodes a base64 + gzip payload, downloads a binary (/tmp/helper), removes security attributes via ‘xattr -c,’ makes it executable, and runs it.
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