A vulnerability in the Screen Sharing feature of macOS allows remote attackers to execute commands with root privileges on affected systems. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-43760, resides in the screensharingd service and impacts configurations where Screen Sharing or Remote Management is enabled together with the legacy option permitting VNC viewers to connect using a password.
Exploitation requires the attacker to know the configured VNC password. Because connections authenticated via the VNC mechanism are not bound to a specific macOS user account, file-transfer components continue to run with root privileges. Researchers demonstrated that an attacker could request protected system files such as /etc/sudoers or create new files inside normally restricted directories.
The ability to write files significantly increased the impact. An attacker could insert a policy file into /private/etc/sudoers.d and grant a non-administrative account the right to execute commands via sudo without providing a password.
The Apple security bulletin describes the impact as possible access to sensitive user data. The company released fixes for CVE-2026-43760 in macOS Tahoe 26.6 and macOS Sonoma 14.8.8 on July 27, 2026.


