Apple System Attacks

I just had machines come back from the road. We were at X Games in Minneapolis, and WSOP in Las Vegas, so almost all of the equipment was out of the office.

One of my machines came back and to my shock when I opened up a browser was telling me that I had a problem, and I should call support. They, of course, were nice enough to provide me a telephone number.

Somebody had installed MacKeeper, I guess to help the situation, but of course, that may have added to the trouble.

So it is time for friendly reminders:

• Do not ever install an anti-virus program on your Mac. Never!
• Never install MacKeeper. It is a vile piece of sh*t that likely caused this mess.
• Make sure you back up your machine on a regular basis.
• Once you get tagged with this crap. Blow it up!

There is only one good way to eliminate any sort of uninvited software from your machine, and that is to burn it to the ground and start over. Yes, you can invest hours in trying to resolve the issue, but you will never know if you actually did resolve the issue. Blow it up!

Apple makes this very easy…

1. Turn the machine off.
2. Reboot the machine holding down Command-R
3. Once you are in recovery, open Disk Utility
4. Format your internal drive. (All your data will go away. You are warned!)
5. Exit Disk Utility once it is done.
6. Reinstall the OS. Apple will load it from the Internet, so a good connection is helpful.

Now you know for a fact that you have a clean version of Apple’s OS running on your system, and you know for a fact, that all the vile garbage has been removed.

b