Suspicious Remote Apple Events Enablement via systemsetup

ATT&CK techniques

Lateral Movement

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
- T1021.004SSH
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects enabling of Remote Apple Events on macOS via systemsetup. This behavior matches in-the-wild macOS lateral movement where attackers turn on the eppc service to send AppleScript commands to remote hosts over the network. Enabling Remote Apple Events is rare in managed environments and provides attackers a native channel for remote code execution.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1021.004 — drag to rearrange

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Suspicious Automated SSH Lateral Movement with Batch Mode (via process_creation)

OpenSSH Native Server Feature Installation (via powershell)

OpenSSH Server Listening on Socket (via openssh)

Suspicious Remote Apple Events Enablement via systemsetup

Pivot detection · T1021.004 · 9 related

Detection content is published as a reviewed draft. Tune thresholds and exclusions against your own telemetry before enabling this rule for alerting.

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