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First Scareware For the Mac

Posted by kdawson on from the rogue-cleaning-tool dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property sends us news from F-Secure of what they claim is the first rogue cleaning tool for the Mac. MacSweeper is a Mac version of Cleanator, hosted from a colo somewhere in the Ukraine. The article points out that the company's About page is lifted verbatim from Symantec's site. With the Mac's market share closing in on double digits, perhaps it's not surprising to see the platform targeted with crapware as PCs have been for years. The F-Secure author adds as a footnote that a journalist said to him something you don't hear every day: "I visited the macsweeper.com website. I know I probably shouldn't have but I used a Windows PC so I knew I wouldn't get infected."

2 of 301 comments (clear)

  1. Isn't any "cleaning tool" rogue on a mac? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The category of "cleaning tools" was rather dodgy even before the trojaned ones started showing up. The notion that getting infected by god knows what, running a little wizard, and being all ok again is insane. Both the notion that one can reliably detect malware that has already had time to romp with your system and the idea that infection is so routine that there should be tools to be run every few days for it are pretty gross.

    And now we have an example of this fine species showing up on a platform that doesn't really have malware. How could anybody trust a cleaner for a platform that doesn't, as yet, need cleaning?

  2. Hi i'm MacSweeper Developer, listen to me by MacSweeper · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I would like to explain all the situation, about MacSweeper. We are really trying to make a good software, and you wont find any viruses/spyware/trojans/malware in MacSweeper (test it your self, if you don't believe me, you can use any type of firewalls, dissemblers, or other tools) . The problem is that we are using selling partners that forces us to use this marketing type. We would like to leave them, we don't want to completely destroy Good Name of MacSweeper application.
    Personally I adore Mac Platform, and it hearts to here that the program you wrote is said to be some kind of "Rogue application" , i wouldn't like to destroy good manners of software written for it :((
    I would like to say sorry for all inconveniences that we could bring to you, but believe MacSweeper is meant to be a useful application.

    You can ask Questions, and i will try to answer them! Thank You!