Pop-up pest MacKeeper patches 0-day remote code execution vuln

A notorious piece of Mac maintenance software been found to have a critical remote code execution vulnerability. MacKeeper is infamous for its “clean up your Mac”-style popups, complete with designed-to-be-confusing "Leave Page/Stay on This Page” dialogues if you try to close the ad. News that the company behind the pestware …

[Crazy Operations Guy]

sudo ./DefinitelyNotAVirus

There are a lot of users out there that will just do whatever a dialog box tells them no matter what OS they use. There is nothing that can be done about idiots getting themselves infected.

I just wish that ISPs would run IDS / IPS type boxes on the network to identify malware crossing the network and kill the connection, or at least cut infected machines off from the rest of the internet and point them to an internal server with cleanup tools.

[James O'Shea]

I've long been of the opinion that MacKeeper is the single most widely spread Mac malware. Ever. Even when it works 'properly' it causes problems.

[Mike Bell]

My Mac works perfectly well without this kind of software. Custom url scheme? Whoa, no thanks. It's just about tolerable to have a custom iTunes url scheme, but not for something like this.

Adverts for 'memory cleaning' utilities are an annoyance, too. With Yosemite, the OS will try its hardest to use all available RAM, because that's why it's there. But many users are still stuck in a Windows XP mentality mode, and panic when they see all their RAM in use, so they're sitting ducks for this kind of ad. Such software invariably causes problems rather than fixing anything.

[Sebby]

"Memory Cleaning" Apps

Some of them are even in the Mac App Store. It bothered me that I couldn't understand how an unprivileged, sandboxed process could "Clean" your memory, until I learned that flushing the disk buffers (the biggest cause of this supposed memory consumption) was a simple system call. Do it yourself, using the "purge" utility. It's magic. It's also no trouble at all to allocate memory to cause pages to be written out, and then immediately "Free" them, thus leaving you some "Free" memory while those pages are not in active use.

Rather sad to see Apple allow this sort of nonsense, but not really all that surprising, either. :(

[chivo243]

If your mac is slow

back everything up, and do a clean install. Don't use this kind of crapware, really, don't do it!