Yesterday I posted about malware that infected my wife's Mac computer. As soon as I published the article, I checked to see if my wife had taken her laptop to work. She hadn't and so I brought it down to my office and ran one more test. I ran yesterday's "find" command prefaced with "sudo" so it looked like this:
sudo find / -name AccessibleEngineSearch -print
The "sudo" command tells the operating system to run as the super-user with permissions. You will need to enter a password before the command runs. Sudo enabled the command to look into more directories than when I ran it the previous day. I found one more instance of the "AccessibleEngineSearch" malware in the startup directory. That means whenever the computer started up, it would try to load the malware. I removed the file and rebooted the laptop. I no longer receive the message telling me that AccessibleEngineSearch can hurt the computer.
My wife came home for lunch as she works less than a mile away and I shared with her that I completely removed the malware from her computer. She also shared that she went through her Applications directory and deleted a number of programs that she didn't recognize. That is another important task when you discover malware on your computer. I didn't feel comfortable doing that as I didn't know if my wife installed a useful utility. I'm glad she took care of it.
As I mentioned, Mac's don't get a lot of malware. When they do, the operating system can keep a lot of damage from happening. It is also fairly easy to remove the offending programs. One still needs to be careful though as bad things can happen on a Mac.
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