Baby’s first malware
I have been so lucky, so careful, and yet today I realised I have been compromised: my mac was compromised (i assume) by a shoddy version of Maccy (a clipboard manager!!!) which installed something called PamStealer on my computer.
What twigged me to it was a very very strange pop up notification, telling me Finder had lost access to Files, with a prompted button to grant “Finder” full disk access. I’ve used Macs for more than thirty years (twenty years with any real zeal) and the notification gave me pause bc it simply did not make sense. I didn’t give the access and instead searched for the exact wording of the popup, and the first result was a Apple community post explaining which malware this was. Further searches gave me more info.
There went the rest of my day, attempting to purge the machine without a clean install (which, miasmatically, I may still do). I think I’m clean now, but fucking hell.
Happy you got it resolved!
mac usually was better about the whole malware stuff but I guess times change, or maybe I was just lucky back when I daily drove it. How did you get an infected download of Maccy?
Used to be that the money was in Windows. Both home and professional computers ran Windows. Writing malware for Mac wasn't really worth it. Nowadays people own Macs left and right.
There are technical reasons too but even then it wasn't impossible to write malware for Mac twenty years ago.
I believe I was affected by this: a copycat URL of the actual site. At the time I hadn’t had any protections running (nothing more extensive than Little Snitch) and Gatekeeper off because, in my hubris, I too had the idea that it was nigh impenetrable. 😫 Apparently this attack was quite the heavy-hitter.
Didn't your browser stop you from visiting the site? Apparently it used a self-signed certificate so I would expect a browser to warn its user that something is fishy!
It does now, but back when I downloaded it, it was a perfect copy of the official site with a functioning cert.