Lots Of Popup On Mac Virus Cleaner

04.12.2020
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Sep 30, 2018  Combo Cleaner is a professional Mac antivirus with hourly malware, viruses, and adware definition updates. Combo Cleaner provides the following features, a Disk Cleaner, remove big files and find duplicate files using its comprehensive scanner to save gigabytes of valuable disk space. If you’re willing to pay a bit more for a Mac cleaner in order to get some enhanced security and optimization, Drive Genius 5 from Prosoft Engineering is the tool to beat. The app includes every feature a cleaner app has to offer, plus additional protection against viruses and malware which helps protect your investment from any threat. 0fficial.info Research When users encounters a virus alert such as 0fficial.info, which looks like system report from Apple Care, it is easy to make them worried and then follow the messages to use deceptive tools to scan system. In fact, the so called Mac Cleaner or antivirus from 0fficial.info is a fake and its purpose is to swindle users to buy their tech support. 0fficial.info is no doubt. Mac cleaners can really help improve the performance of your Mac and keep it protected from malware and viruses. There has always been an argument whether a Mac needs antivirus protection, however as many Mac users now know Yes Mac computers DO benefit from using antivirus software and there are many free versions available that will go a long. Mac Ads Cleaner is left-over garbage from the Advanced Mac Cleaner scumware, which I stupidly downloaded attached to a fake Flash update notification. I thought I had deleted everything and the popups disappeared for a week or so. I even did the latest OSX update to 10.12.3. Feb 19, 2018  Advanced Mac Cleaner Gone Forever! Get rid of Advanced Mac Cleaner and other malware apps for good by manually deleting them from your system library.

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  4. How To Check For Virus On Mac

A decade-old Windows malware trojan wormed its way into the macOS ecosystem, complete with a signed (likely stolen) Apple developer certificate. The exploit appears as an Adobe Flash Player installer. Once permission is granted, it hides itself deep inside macOS folders. Its certificate has already been revoked by Apple, but it's good to be aware of your enemies.

According to Fox-IT, Snake, a malware framework that has been infecting Windows software since 2008, and more recently Linux, is now targeting Mac.

Now, Fox-IT has identified a version of Snake targeting Mac OS X.As this version contains debug functionalities and was signed on February 21st, 2017 it is likely that the OS X version of Snake is not yet operational.Fox-IT expects that the attackers using Snake will soon use the Mac OS X variant on targets.

Snakes are dangerous and here's why

Similar to the Dok trojan that we heard about earlier this week, Snake popped up with an authenticated developer certificate, which means the Mac's built-in security system, Gatekeeper, would consider it legit and allow the installation process to complete.

It's important to note that Apple has already revoked this fake or stolen developer certificate, so Gatekeeper will block it. However, there is still a slight chance of someone downloading Snake by accident if they've found it through dubious channels. Malwarebytes explains:

Fortunately, Apple revoked the certificate very quickly, so this particular installer is no further danger unless the user is tricked into downloading it via a method that doesn't mark it with a quarantine flag (such as via most torrent apps).

How Snake slithers into your Mac

Just like most malware attacks, Snake doesn't just magically appear on your Mac one day. There isn't someone shooting corrupted files through your ethernet cable directly into your software. Snake has to be welcomed into your operating system by you.

Think of it is a vampire. If you don't invite it into your home, it can't attack you.

The file, named Install Adobe Flash Player.app.zip, will appear to be an Adobe Flash installer (Say what you will about Flash, but there are still a lot of people that have to use it for school or work). From Malwarebytes:

If the app is opened, it will immediately ask for an admin user password, which is typical behavior for a real Flash installer. If such a password is provided, the behavior continues to be consistent with the real thing.

Interestingly, once the installation is complete, Flash is actually installed on the Mac, making it even more difficult to tell that it's a trojan.

How you can protect yourself against Snake

As noted above, the fake/stolen developer certificate that allowed Snake to get a pass from Gatekeeper has already been revoked, so it's likely that, even if you download the zip file and try to open the app, your built-in security program will say, 'Nope Dope!'

But to refresh best practices, if you receive an email with an attachment at all, do some due diligence to make sure it's from a legitimate source. Check the sender address to make sure it is from an address you recognize. Click on the sender's name to view the email address it was sent from to make sure it's not a spoofed email. If you're still unsure, confirm with the sender by texting, calling or sending a separate email asking if the attachment is legit.

Specific to the Snake trojan, avoid downloading any zip files with the name Install Adobe Flash Player.app.zip.

What to do if Snake already bit you

Do you like my snake puns?

If you think you might have managed to accidentally install the Snake trojan onto your Mac, you can find and delete the following files:

  • /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.adobe.update.plist
  • /Library/Scripts/installd.sh
  • /Library/Scripts/queue
  • /var/tmp/.ur-*
  • /tmp/.gdm-socket
  • /tmp/.gdm-selinux

Next, delete the stolen/fake signed Apple Developer certificate.

  1. Launch Finder.
  2. Select Applications.
  3. Open your Utilities folder.
  4. Double-click on Keychain Access.
  5. Select the certificate named Adobe Flash Player installer with the signed certificate issued to Addy Symonds.
  6. Right or Control + click on the Certificate.
  7. Select Delete Certificate from the drop down options.
  8. Select Delete to confirm that you want to delete the certificate.

Lastly, change your administrator password to ensure that you're backdoor is rekeyed so the hackers can't get back in.

Remember best practices for staying safe

It is unlikely, at this point, that Snake will slither through your Mac's backdoor. For one, Apple has revoked the certificate, which makes it nearly impossible to make it through the installation process without you knowing about it.

To reiterate, don't open attachments from unknown sources. Double check the sender email address to make sure it is not spoofed. Don't open suspicious-looking files or give administrator permission to unknown programs. You can protect yourself from attacks if you stay safe.

If you do end up with malware on your Mac, take a moment to relax and know that everything will be O.K. You can remove malware on your own, but if it seems too difficult for you to tackle, you can talk to Apple support. Someone will be able to help you.

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Though it's not easy to hack into or break through a Mac's security, it is possible, especially if someone accidentally installs malware without realizing it. If your Mac is running slow or you're seeing unusual advertisements within your web browser you might have accidentally installed malware at some point. Don't worry. It happens to the best of us (not me, of course). There are things you can do without having to burn it all down.

The problem: Mac malware in the Library folder

Serenity Caldwell writing for iMore in 2017:

My father-in-law's MacBook Pro had been running into curious slowdowns for a two-year-old laptop and he kept on seeing weird sites taking over his Safari and Firefox search bars. It was clear to me that his browser had been hijacked.

We got rid of the browser hijack pretty quickly — I suggest using Cella's excellent how-to if you ever run into a browser hijack yourself — but the slowdowns were more curious. Upon further investigation, I found a couple of self-professed 'Mac security programs' that popped up, demanding money to 'clean your Mac from junk'.

Spoiler: These programs were the junk. And worst of all, they'd seemingly added a bunch of nonsense files into this computer's Library folder, with random folder names like 'prestidigitation' and 'beeswax'.

Now, I want to preface: I'd never seen an attack like this on a Mac before in my life, and finding this kind of full-Mac hijack is very rare. It's likely that he accidentally installed one of these 'security' programs (or had it installed), which spiraled out of control from there.

These hijacks didn't appear to be able to do much beyond slow down his machine with endless failed attempts to run a program — the process didn't have admin permissions, so it couldn't execute a thing from the library. But because they were there, they were constantly crashing aspects of his Mac. I knew I had a malfunctioning laptop on my hands, so I turned to my age-old troubleshooting checklist.

How to fix a corrupted Mac

If you're working on a computer that has slowed down beyond reasonable aging or is otherwise acting beyond the pale, here are my favorite tactics you can take to try and restore it to its former glory.

Update the system software

This is almost always the first thing I do when troubleshooting Macs: Chances are, the user hasn't installed a security update or other software updates that may be slowing their computer to a crawl.

  1. Click on the Apple menu icon in the upper left corner of the screen.

  2. Select App Store to open the Mac App Store.

  3. Click on the Updates tab at the top of the Mac App Store window.

  4. Install all relevant updates. (You may need the Apple ID and password for the machine.)

If the computer is running macOS Sierra, you can avoid having to do this troubleshooting step in the future by turning on Automatic Install in System Preferences, which can automatically download newly available updates in the background, and install them overnight.

  1. With the Mac App Store open, click on App Store in the upper left corner of the Menu bar.

  2. Click on Preferences.

  3. Under Automatically check for updates, check the following boxes:

    • Download newly available updates in the background
    • Install app updates
    • Install macOS updates
    • Install system data files and security updates

Check the disk for errors

If software updates aren't doing the trick, the next thing to check is the hard drive itself. With Apple's Internet Recovery partition, fixing a cranky drive is an easy process.

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  1. Restart your Mac.
  2. During reboot, hold down Command-R until it starts up.
  3. Once rebooted, you should be in the Internet Recovery Partition. Select Disk Utility.

  4. Click Continue.

  5. In Disk Utility, click on the First Aid button,

  6. Click on Run to execute.

Your Mac will then run a cursory check on its hard drive to determine if there's anything wrong — and if so — if it can fix it.

Reset the NVRAM/PRAM and SMC

If neither app updates nor disk repair are helping, sometimes a good cache flush can get your Mac running just a bit more smoothly.

To reset the NVRAM (or, on older Macs, PRAM), reboot the Mac and hold down the following keyboard command during startup for at least twenty seconds: Command-Option-P-R.

After you reset your NVRAM, you may be required to reconfigure some system settings (like sound and time zones), which are stored in that cache.

Point to your.dmg (or choose All Files to select an.iso) file and click Open. It will take a few minutes depending on size of.dmg and speed of USB drive, but once done you can pop it into your mac, hold down the option key when turning on the mac and choose the USB drive. Puting a dmg on a usb.

An SMC reset is a bit more complicated, and Apple recommends it only after all other troubleshooting avenues have been exhausted.

If you're using a laptop:

  1. Shut down your Mac and plug it in.
  2. Restart the computer by pressing the Power button along with the keyboard command Shift-Control-Option.
  3. Release these keys, then just press the Power button to properly start your computer.

If you're using a desktop:

  1. Shut down your Mac.
  2. Unplug it and wait for at least 20 seconds.
  3. Plug the Mac back in and wait 5-10 seconds.
  4. Restart your Mac with the Power button.

Partition your disk (or erase it)

After exhausting all other avenues, this was the solution we came across to properly fix the broken laptop. The hard drive had been so corrupted by these 'security' programs that there was nothing I could do to fix it. When Safari launched over the login screen after a reboot, I knew my usual fixes wouldn't work: It was time to bring out the big guns.

In most cases, I'd grab an external drive, back up the corrupted disk, then wipe the drive clean with the Internet Recovery partition and start over. But there were a couple of reasons that wouldn't work here:

  • We were on vacation, and lacking any sort of external media.
  • With a semi-corrupted disk, we couldn't just clone the user folder and restore the new disk from a backup — we'd have to do a clean install, which meant moving files over one by one. If we'd missed something and moved all the old files to an external drive, my father-in-law would have had to carry it everywhere just in case.

Given that this laptop had a 500GB hard drive — only 40GB of which was being used — I had an alternate idea: I'd partition the drive, again using Internet Recovery, and install macOS Sierra on the new partition. Essentially, it would be a 'clean' new computer for my father-in-law to work on, but all the original data would still exist on the old partition in case he needed to grab a file.

Note: In order to partition your drive, you'll need enough free space on your drive to do so — at least 30GB. If you're light on space, you may want to back up your corrupted disk to a USB drive, instead.

How to create a partition on your Mac

  1. Open Finder from your dock.

  2. Select Applications.

  3. Scroll down and open the Utilities folder.

  4. Double-click to open Disk Utility.

  5. Select your hard drive in the Disk Utility window. It will be the first drive on the list. It might be named 'Fusion,' or 'Macintosh HD.'
  6. Click on the Partition tab.

  7. Click the plus (+) button.

  8. Change the size of the partition you wish to use by dragging the resize controls. The used space is represented in blue.
  9. Name the new partition.

  10. Click apply.

Disk Utility will check the disk and make changes. This will take several minutes.Disk Utility will then make the changes. After that's completed, quit Disk Utility to return to the main Internet Recovery menu.

  1. Click on Reinstall macOS.

  2. Click Continue.

  3. Click Agree to agree to Apple's licensing agreements.
  4. Choose the New Mac hard drive as the disk you'd like to install macOS onto.

  5. Press Install.

  6. The Mac will download a fresh copy of your operating system from the App Store and will install it. The speed of this process entirely depends on your Mac's connection speed to the Internet. You can wait an hour or longer on a slower connection.
  7. Your Mac will restart automatically into the new partition once the software has downloaded, then the installation of the operating system will continue.

After you finish setting up the new hard drive, it's time to move your files over. Because of the way partitioning works, your old hard drive partition will show up next to your currently-active partition, just like an external drive; you can then grab any files you need from it.

Microsoft Pop Up Virus

  1. Launch a Finder window.
  2. Under Devices in the sidebar, locate your original Macintosh HD.

  3. Copy any files you'd like to keep from your old hard drive to the new machine.

Note: If you want to copy over applications, I'd strongly suggest redownloading them from the source — the Mac App Store or the company's website — rather than trying to copy them over from the old partition.

From here, you can follow instructions for setting a Mac up from scratch when it comes to installing and customizing anything else.

I generally recommend keeping the old drive partition around for at least a few months in case you or your family member forgets to move something over; after that period, however, you can easily delete the old partition and move to the new partition full time.

Consider additional anti-malware protection

While malware on the Mac is rare, it does crop up, as we've demonstrated. Having the right tools to get rid of malware can be an important part of keeping your Mac safe and secure. There are a number of tools that you can choose from, including popular programs like BitDefender and Kaspersky, that will help you keep malware from infecting your Mac.

Macbook Pop Up Virus

Questions?

Do you have any must-follow troubleshooting steps? Let us know in the comments.

Updated July 2019: Added a sub-section regarding anti-malware protection.

Serenity Caldwell contributed to an earlier version of this guide.

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STELA for Apple Arcade is a shallow, sadistic, totally fun game

Can you outrun killer dark shadows? Take leaps of faith into the unknown? Traverse a world where nothing is what it seems? STELA will test your mettle.