Some Mac applications tend to become more resource-intensive as they evolve. This is a normal upshot of advanced features being brought to users’ fingertips, but it might also be a source of performance issues on older machines that lack RAM and CPU power to cope with growingly complex tasks thrown at them. Whilst a popup alert saying “Your computer is low on memory” seems to be a symptom of such a predicament, it could as well mean that the Mac is infected with a virus.

There are numerous facets and shades of Mac adware. Some of these junk apps fully live up to their categorization, displaying ads on most web pages the victim visits. Others use a different tactic that involves an unauthorized overhaul of one’s browser settings to reroute the traffic. The Bing redirect virus targeting Mac, as the name suggests, falls under the latter cluster.

Macs are generally thought of as smoothly performing machines whose operating system intelligently allocates hardware resources for hassle-free user experience. However, this beauty mostly resides in the realms of theory. The down-to-earth state of things is that users regularly bump into predicaments where a specific process saps their Macs’ processing power for no apparent reason.

Mac adware and browser hijackers tend to be treated synonymously these days, because most browser-targeting threats are hybrid and call forth a mix of noxious symptoms. If a sketchy ad is recurrently popping up in the middle of web surfing sessions on different websites, it means that the root cause for the issue resides in the system rather than the web services being visited.

Web surfing is indispensable to user experience, no matter how prosaic it sounds. With this in mind, malware makers have focused on targeting browsers for years. From a cybercriminal’s perspective, one of the top reasons to take this route is that web navigation tools are comparatively easy to exploit. The authors of Smokyashan, a malicious Mac app that skews its victims’ Internet preferences to promote junk services, are ramping up their attempts to become major players in this shady niche.

To make the most of a web browser, one of the first things on everyone’s to-do list is to customize it. Assigning preferred values to the homepage, default search engine, and new tab setups is a threefold shortcut that makes the online pastime smooth. But what if a user is deprived of this prerogative? Such a situation isn’t uncommon, and it always boils down to adware such as Shroomcourt. Here is a report on this strain that includes, among other things, applicable removal steps.