His AI Assistant Caught Hackers Inside His Mac and Helped Clean Them Out
The intruder had the highest level of control, but the assistant spotted it, traced it to a four-second window, and helped wipe it clean.
Stratechery · Apple and a Hacker’s Future | Stratechery by Ben ThompsonThe warning arrived during a routine restart.
Ben Thompson, a writer who covers technology, watched as Claude, his coding assistant, stopped its work and reported trouble on his Mac mini, a small desktop computer he leaves running all the time.
That machine ran almost nothing except a coding tool and a persistent assistant that records his ideas and tracks his projects. That narrow setup would turn out to matter.
The assistant restarts a small monitoring program every 30 minutes. On one restart, it spotted what Thompson had missed: someone had broken in with root access, the most powerful level of control on a Mac, and planted software to mine cryptocurrency.
Claude's message was blunt: “Urgent. The Mac Mini looks compromised. Someone with admin root access has planted a crypto miner on it. I have stopped running commands and I’ve not changed or deleted anything.”
The assistant had more detail. It said Thompson’s account could now run administrator commands without a password, which was probably how the files were written, and it listed next steps.
One of those steps was to stop using the assistant. Thompson ignored that advice and used it to hunt instead.
Together they combed through logs and traces until they found the exact four-second window when the intruders got in. They built a small tool to watch for a repeat, then Thompson wiped the machine clean.
All of that happened before he found press coverage explaining the flaw. In his telling, the emptiness of the machine was his saving grace, and the ever present assistant became the burglar alarm.
Questions people ask
What does root access mean?
Root is the most powerful account on a Mac. It can install programs and change system settings, which is why attackers prize it and why the warning was urgent.
How did the intruders get into the Mac?
Through a flaw in the Mac’s screen-sharing feature that Apple said may allow an attacker without credentials to gain access. Dutch officials warned the flaw was under active exploitation on systems where port 5900 was accessible from the internet.
Is it safe to give an AI assistant that much access?
It carries real risk, because broad access can expose files, messages, and other private data if something goes wrong. Thompson argues there can be a benefit too. In this case a persistent assistant noticed trouble a person would miss, but the tradeoff remains unresolved.