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MacKeeper Discloses 13 Million Mac Users' Details With Poor Hash Protection (mackeeper.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Mac security software suite MacKeeper is recovering after a hack leaked millions of users' personal information. Kromtech, the software developer, confirmed that it had received notice of the hack yesterday, discovering a hole in its security which was exposing customer usernames, email addresses and other personal data for as much as 13 million users. The hole was patched within a matter of hours after security researcher Chris Vickery had published details of the error over the weekend. Vickery, who had been unfamiliar with both MacKeeper and Kromtech, explained that he had discovered the security fault by browsing the connected devices search engine Shodan.io.
With the amount of "MacKeeper" subterfuge style pop-up ads that appear all over the place, I've always assumed that it was a scam. Kind of like the random calls you get from India saying your Windows machine has a virus - even if you don't use Windows.
FTA:
‘The data was/is publicly available. No exploits or vulnerabilities involved. They published it to the open web with no attempt at protection,’ Vickery wrote in a Reddit post. He noted that Kromtech was alerted and was able to quickly patch the vulnerability.
There was no need for a hack because it was published to the open web!
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
This is really big news, 13 million Mac users were gullible enough to buy MacKeeper!
Monstar L
First line should read
Mac malware vendor Mackeeper
I was trying to download LibreOffice and somehow wound up with MacKeeper. The installation process didn't even tell me what it was. Once I realized it was a scam (which didn't take very long), it was a bitch to get rid of! It has processes that would respawn after they were killed. That's not a good sign, especially for something that isn't essential to system functionality. And it kept starting up on boot-up even if you moved it to the trash. You had to empty the trash and remove some files in Library in order to totally get rid of it.
I'm almost thinking this is a planted story (not on /. part) so they look legit and people keep MacKeeper on their systems. I agree with others, 13 million sounds very high. They have some brass balls!
It uses immorale advertising tactics to sell itself to people. Says they have viruses when they don't and scares old people.
Anyone else notice that tons of apps on SourceForge (owned by the same great overlord as /.) are bundling MacKeeper with the installer? Seriously, I've tried to grab a few apps from SourceForge recently only to find the app I'm trying to grab wrapped with some kind of crap-ware installer. Apparently it's wrapped at random and doesn't always happen to everyone. After seeing a few installers that I got from SF fail or never install my app or attempt to connect to the internet (and thankfully able to be stopped by Little Snitch), I did a few google searches to figure out WTF... Apparently SF has been doing this for a while now - and so really, I partially blame them for the fact that so many people have this kind of crap installed on their machines... See the reviews on FileZilla for some reviewers complaining about this very thing.