CVE-2026-7483: local privilege escalation in ESET security applications for macOS
Antivirus software on macOS often runs with root privileges so it can inspect, quarantine, and restore files across the system. In this case, an ESET XPC service accepted unauthenticated local connections and could pass a file descriptor opened as root to a client-selected socket. An unprivileged user could turn that behavior into a controlled file write and, after a reboot, root code execution.
This is a local privilege escalation. An attacker must already be able to run code as an unprivileged user on a Mac with an affected ESET product installed. It is not a remote drive-by, and nothing in this post turns it into one.
