We don’t usually raise alarms like this, but if you have Adware Doctor (formerly known as Adware Medic), the #1 selling app in the Apple App Store, uninstall Adware Doctor now! It is malware and this news is extremely important.
Why? Adware Doctor (also App Store’s Dr. Antivirus and Dr. Cleaner) has been stealing your browser history if you use Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. What does it do with your browser history? It sends that data to China. And it’s been doing that for years. How did we find out? On Patrick Wardle’s website, Objective-See. A site dedicated to developing Mac OS X security tools. He’s looked deep inside Adware Doctor and discovered that, under the hood, the app was deceitfully bypassing Apple’s security restraints. This is a astronomical privacy issue and we want you to know about it. So, please uninstall Adware Doctor, Dr. Antivirus and Dr. Cleaner if you have them.
What I’ve discovered in my search for uninstalling Adware Doctor is, lots of very dicey “uninstall software” websites. They run down a list of procedures for removal that would be complicated for most users and pepper the text with ads for (you guessed it!) their recommendation for “easy” to use removal software. Please, don’t download these.
Removing apps from your Mac is relatively easy. MacWorld UK has a step-by-step article on how to uninstall software apps on mac. This will get you started, but these kinds of malicious apps can go unnoticed for years. So, please read on.
Malwarebytes Labs’ most recent September 7th blog post has noted this very important privacy issue and will be updated to include all the above mentioned offenders and more in their soon to be released next version of Malwarebytes. Our recommendation has always been Malwarebytes for all our clients. There’s a 30 day free trial of this highly regarded and easy to use software. We implicitly trust Malwarebytes for all desktop Macs and PCs and we’ve used it to save our client’s from grief many a time.
They’ve also introduced Malwarebytes for iOS. However, we haven’t used it yet and the reviews are mediocre (3.3 star rating) at the time of this writing. However, I do want to note here that, every comment on the Malwarebytes for iOS page in the App Store has a Developer Response. Those guys keep on top of their product.
And, for the record, we don’t profit from recommending Malwarebytes.