This includes its use in adware, its use for tasks such as persistence, anti-analysis, browser hijacking, spoofing and more. There is much less attention in the security field on AppleScript – a built-in macOS technology – despite the fact it’s been around for as long as Python and predates macOS 10 itself by 8 or 9 years.Īs I’ll show in this post, AppleScript is widely used by offensive actors.

When we think about security on macOS and the tools used by offensive actors, whether those are real in the wild attacks or red team exercises, we tend to think of things like python scripts, shell scripts, malicious documents, shady extensions and of course, the fake, doctored or trojan application bundle.