[felixrieseberg]

If you're already running code on the victim's machine, presumably with sudo rights to change `/Applications`, you've already hit the jackpot. Yes, you can change apps, but if you're the victim, that's _probably_ not the biggest issue. It's the rootkit on your machine.

[cjbprime]

This (FS write access == game over) is usually true on Linux, but the Mac and Windows codesigning infrastructures exist to offer some protections and user warnings in this case, and they're what's being defeated by this attack.

[kogir]

With FS access you can just strip the signature entirely and it’ll run without any fuss. In this case it’s the machine that’s compromised, not the app.

[anonymous6969]

OSX is getting rid of the ability to run unsigned kernel extensions pretty soon. Compiled off the shelf RATs are usually lit up pretty well by modern AV as can be seen by Virustotal results. And a noisy python/ruby/whatever executable on the marketing persons computer would raise a few eyebrows in some organizations. Slack/Discord on the other hand...