Malware/Adware on my Mac!
So that was scary...I got home last night after 4 days at my mom’s, fired up Chrome, and noticed it was acting very funny. I kept getting pop-up warnings about my Flash player being out of date, virus protection being out of date, with links to very suspicious looking urls to update or renew. Then it seemed like any time I opened a new window I was getting more pop-ups and redirects.
This all started as soon as I get home. I blame Mr. Hawkland. (He’s a PC user and on more than one occasion our home network has gotten fucked up because he’s not very net-savvy and clicks on dumb shit ALL THE TIME.)
I’m trying everything and freaking out because I have NEVER had this particular kind of problem on my mac before. DNS hijacked? Nope, utility is saying there’s no problem there. Run a thorough MacScan and no malware is coming up as detected. I try clearing my cache/cookies. I try disabling and then uninstalling all extensions. I try completely reinstalling Chrome. Shit keeps coming back, but it’s not affecting any other browsers.
I’m getting desperate here and finally find a Mac forums post to check for any applications I don’t remember downloading recently...sure enough there’s some little piece of shit called “Optibuy” sitting in my applications folder from a few days ago! Google-searching for that comes up with a lot of shady looking websites saying it’s adware and “dangerous” to try removing on our on your own...oh but buy/download this ONE PARTICULAR malware removal to get rid of it safely. (And the text on every website is in the same, slightly-mangled English.)
Yeah, sure.
So I delete the app and reboot everything...and next day my computer seems fine. Anyway, just posting this as a warning to any other Mac users out there who think their computers are safe from these kinds of things...you might want to check your Apps folder for this one as not even any of my scanning/privacy/security apps could find it lurking there.
