The AppleScript version, however, is something of an entirely different nature. Path, dirs, files = next(os.walk("/usr/bin")) Python is a little more verbose, but still fairly clean and familiar: #!/usr/bin/python As ever, a shell script will always be the most concise: ls -l /usr/bin | wc -l Compare the code for the simple task of counting the number of items in /usr/bin directory. It’s quirky because it attempts to use “natural language” but in a grammar that is entirely artificial, often inconsistent and frustratingly unintuitive. Unlike Bash and other shell languages, and unlike Python, a cross-platform, beginner-friendly scripting language that has achieved widespread adoption and praise, AppleScript is a language peculiar to macOS not only can you NOT use it on other Desktop operating systems like Windows and Linux, you can’t even use it on Apple’s other operating systems like iOS and iPadOS.Īs a language, AppleScript has a reputation for being quirky, slow and difficult to develop even simple scripts with. Why Have the Good Guys Ignored AppleScript? Worryingly, given the lack of attention paid to AppleScript in the research community, that is all without even leveraging some of AppleScript’s most powerful or unique features, some of which we’ll cover below (others I’ve written about before here). 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.
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