As we have told you in the introduction, the fact of having spyware on a MacBook is something that is much more remote than on other devices and operating systems.
Most of the time it is caused by the user himself rather than by the computer, since it may be the case that a download is made that shouldn’t be done, click on a link where it was best to let it pass or open a file attached to email that was infected, among other similar situations.
If something like this happens to us, it could be that we find ourselves with some type of malicious software that is responsible for intensively monitoring our activity, collecting our passwords, the names of the people with whom we interact, or things like that. That is, to endanger our privacy.
The bad thing for us is that this type of program hides itself extremely effectively and, at first, we will not notice anything on the system, so everything will seem normal to us, while in the background this software will be working.
It is especially difficult to make everything free of these programs again, especially if we are not able to know that they are present in our operating system.
But if we know what we should look for and where we can find it, we will be able to solve the problem and make this malicious software no longer present on our MacBook.
What is more than clear is that we must have some guidelines both in detection and in the rest of the operations that we are going to have to carry out so that in our Apple we do not have any type of program that can cause us problems or steal confidential information.
How to find spyware on a MacBook?
When we have a MacBook, we can interpret some indicators as informers that we might have spyware on the system.
If you notice that the operation of the computer is slower than normal, if you see some files or browser extensions that you do not remember having installed, if the browser has suddenly set a different start page than the one we had for it or if the MacBook tells us security flaws even when we’re not looking, so we might have spyware.
You can try to check it manually when the performance has dropped as follows:
- We open Applicationslater Utilities to then go to activity tracker or directly search activity tracker in the Finder search bar.
- We double click on the application to open it.
- now in the field Name of process, located under the CPU tab (which should be selected by default), we review what is listed and how much of the CPU percentage it requires to operate.
- If we are not sure about any of the process names, we simply type them into the Google search engine and we will know what they are and what they are used for.
- The moment we find a type of malicious software, within the Activity Monitor, click on the item and then select the x button at the top left to finish it.
- We also open the tab Memory and analyze the section name of process to see if there are any names we don’t know. You just have to look at the ones that use the most memory.
We can also check the apps installed on the MacBook to make sure we don’t have anything weird installed on the computer.
To achieve this, you must do the following:
- We open the folder Applications which is located in the left sidebar of the Finder.
- At that time we must look for any application that we have not installed yourself.
- We click on controller + [Programa] and we select move to trash.
- Remember empty the trash to permanently remove the unwanted app from the system.
- Next, it is convenient to go to the folder Mac Downloads and remove anything we haven’t downloaded ourselves. As we did in the previous case, we must not forget to empty the trash if you delete any particular file.
Another option we have is configure a firewall so you can mount the computer activity. You can also activate a firewall protection when entering security and privacy in the system presences.
Once activated we can configure it so that you manage applications and services in a specific way, even activating the covert modeto make it more complicated to find our computer.
Get rid of spyware
The most effective way right now to completely get rid of any malware on a MacBook is to completely reformat it.
To achieve this we must do the following:
- We restart the MacBook and immediately hold down Command + R to start in recovery mode.
- We select disk utility Y we erase the hard drive. Note that this removes spyware, but also all other files, applications, and settings on your computer.
- It is best to make a backup of what we are going to need before reformatting.
If we don’t want to do something radical like that, it’s best to have the latest system updates up to date, because many of them are direct solutions against this type of software.
We can also try to close the spyware (as long as we have it located and we know what it is), through the activity trackerof manual way Y uninstall it as we do with any other program.
From that same place we can also search for malicious software from the system and put it in the Trash as soon as we detect it, deleting it immediately so that it does not remain there.
As you have been able to read, we will be able to identify spyware and eliminate it also on our MacBook, although Apple’s system is the least likely to be affected by this type of software.
No action is difficult to carry out, but, as happens with any operating system, once infected, it is not exactly easy to identify and completely delete these programs that can do us so much damage, especially in terms of privacy.