The vulnerability arises from insufficient validation of symbolic links, allowing an application to construct or follow a symlink that points to a restricted location. An attacker could exploit this to bypass the operating system’s privacy preferences, reading or modifying files that the user has explicitly denied access to. The weakness is a type of path traversal that permits unauthorized file access, aligning with the CWE-59 classification.

Apple’s macOS is impacted, specifically versions prior to the release that includes the fix. The vendor notes that the issue is addressed in macOS Sequoia 15.7 and macOS Tahoe 26; any earlier updates lack the validation fix and therefore remain vulnerable.

The CVSS score of 5.5 suggests a moderate severity, and the EPSS score of less than 1 % indicates a low likelihood of exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability is not listed in the CISA KEV catalog. Although the attack vector is not explicitly documented, the nature of the flaw implies that a local or compromised application could exercise the privilege escalation, so environments running untrusted third‑party software without stringent sandboxing are most at risk.