Sandboxed Mac Apps Can Record Screen Any Time Without You Knowing (bleepingcomputer.com)

Posted by msmash on Sunday February 11, 2018 @04:41AM from the security-woes dept.

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: Malicious app developers can secretly abuse a macOS API function to take screenshots of the user's screen and then use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to programmatically read the text found in the image. The function is CGWindowListCreateImage, often utilized by Mac apps that take screenshots or live stream a user's desktop. According to Fastlane Tools founder Felix Krause, any Mac app, sandboxed or not, can access this function and secretly take screenshots of the user's screen. Krause argues that miscreants can abuse this privacy loophole and utilize CGWindowListCreateImage to take screenshots of the screen without the user's permission.

1 of 59 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Is this news? by QuietLagoon · 2018-02-11 05:19 · Score: 3, Informative

...Does the sandbox promise to change this?...
Yes. A sandbox is a sandbox. You play inside your sandbox and are unable to affect or access things outside your sandbox that you should not access. It seems that, at some point, Apple forgot to restrict access to this API for sandboxed apps.