“MacSweeper” warning — The price of popularity
NewsThere is a company that has introduced a utility called “MacSweeper” with two versions, free and not-so-free. If you visit their web site, it will offer to perform a free scan of your system and, if problems are found, will helpfully suggest that you upgrade to the full version to resolve them. The trouble is, the free version always finds problems.
Always.
Let me be clear: This Mac-only utility will find Mac-only errors no matter what machine you use to run the scan, even if that computer is a PC running Windows.
This class of classless application is called a “rogue”, and, although this kind of scam is common in the Windows world, it is the first such program known to exist on the Mac.
That’s the price of popularity, I guess.
That the idea is unoriginal should come as no surprise since even their web site was copied from Apple and Symantec. I won’t give you the link, but you can read one of the stories with more details here:
http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001362.html
It’s unfortunate, but the lesson is, if you see a utility (or any application, for that matter) from an unknown company, you should be a little skeptical. In this case, MacSweeper reportedly does nothing more than lie to you, but it just as easily could have caused the problems that it purports to fix.
January 20th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
A Deeper Look On MacSweeper, with developer comments:
http://blog.iantivirus.com/2008/01/deeper-look-on-macsweeper.html
January 20th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
FYI, although I do not know his exact role, “angelo” seems to be affiliated with MacSweeper and appears to be the one leaving the comments on the referenced blog.
The article he mentions is a good read too, if you’re still interested in this little drama, although I can’t understand why he thinks it will help his cause.