Potentially unwanted software on Mac

Adware, pop—ups and Trojans are something that didn’t exist before, but has started to appear in Mac OS X recently. This type of parasite is aimed at only one thing — making money by generating traffic, showing the user a variety of ads, redirecting the browser to various malicious and misleading websites.

These malware get into the system not because of various vulnerabilities in Mac OS X, but because of the user’s inattention when installing free programs downloaded from the Internet. As they say, free cheese happens only in a mousetrap, and free programs are a potential opportunity to infect your mac with an advertising program or pop—ups. It’s simple, the authors of free programs include a variety of extras in them, which are absolutely unnecessary in everyday work, and also interfere. Many people know the uTorrent program. When installing it, if you do not carefully read the information that will be shown, you can infect your computer with two unnecessary programs that will change the home page, search engine, will show ads, and so on.

But this does not mean that you need to use only paid programs and forget about the huge number of necessary and most importantly free programs. Just when installing a new program unknown to you, always carefully read the rules of use, pay attention to which components are installed, what function they will perform in the system.

Signs of infection of Mac OS X with potentially unwanted software:

1. Advertising banners and contextual advertising appeared on pages where it never existed
2. Links appeared on web pages instead of plain text, when clicked on which redirects to an advertising site
3. The browser began to open pages offering to update the video player, install a new flash player, check Mac OS X for viruses
4. There are new applications that you did not install yourself

How to remove potentially unwanted software from Mac?

Recommended Anti-malware tools:

The easiest and most modern way of removing potentially unwanted software from Mac is to use automatic removal tools. See our Anti-malware tools below for further instructions.

Also, you can try to remove potentially unwanted software from Mac manually.

On this page you will get acquainted with the full instructions describing the process of removing advertising applications, potentially unnecessary programs, redirects in browsers in Mac OS X. You need to follow this instruction step by step, if something does not work out for you, we recommend that you use an automated tool.

First step:

1. First of all, you need to find the program. If it’s icon is placed on the Desktop, read on. If it’s not, open the Applications folder and browse for it.
2. Drag-and-drop icon of the program to the Trash on the Desktop. When it’s done you can hear a specific sound of a crunched paper. You can always get your programs or other files back from the Trash in case you delete anything by mistake.
3. If you are sure that the program in the Trash needs to be uninstalled, right click on the Trash icon, then choose Empty Trash and confirm it. You can also use Command + Shift + Del combination to empty the trash.

Second step:

The program is uninstalled, now it’s time to get rid of support and preferences files.

1. Open the Library folder by holding the Option button and clicking the Go menu.
2. Browse for any folders or files with the program’s or developer’s name. You can also try to seek for these files in ~/Library/Application Support/, and ~/Library/Preferences/ folders.
3. Once you’ve found the files or folders, you can delete them by moving them to the Trash. Empty the Trash to get rid of these files.

Removing extensions on Mac from Safari

1. Launch the Safari app and open Safari menu and select Preferences;
2. Go to the Extensions tab;
3. Click on the extension you want to remove and choose Uninstall;
4. This is the easy way to remove Safari extension, but you can also manually remove extensions from Safari.

Manually deleting Safari extensions on Mac

Sometimes the Extensions manager won’t be able remove the extensions itself. First method above won’t work. This is rare case, but it can happen with an incompatible extension that refuses to remove itself. If this happens, you can manually delete an extension from Safari extensions folder.

1. Close Safari
2. Hit Command+Shift+G from Finder to bring up Go folder then type the following path:
   ~/Library/Safari/Extensions/;
3. Select Go and you’ll see the Safari extensions folder, delete unnecessary extensions;
4. Relaunch Safari.