Analysts at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne have recently shed light on a long-running macOS cryptomining malware strain codenamed OSAMiner. These would have been garden-variety findings if it weren’t for the fact that the infection has been playing a hide-and-seek game with researchers since around 2015. Its uniqueness stems from the use of what’s called run-only AppleScript files to download and execute the dodgy components.

Browser preferences are among the fundamentals of regular computer use, being nifty shortcuts to personalize one’s Internet experience. This convenience works flawlessly until a piece of malware shows up. The category of harmful code called adware is the one to blame for tweaking victims’ web navigation defaults, as is the case with the Yahoo redirect virus on Mac. This article explains the mechanics of said attack vector.

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.

No matter how prosaic it sounds, secure web surfing is a prerequisite for a hassle-free user experience overall. Why? Because the only way cyber threats are propagating is via the Internet. Thankfully, web browsers, Internet Service Providers, and security applications are doing a commendable job of blocking malware installation attempts and online frauds. However, as is the case with safebrowse.io alerts, sometimes this benign activity goes buggy and is at odds with normal Mac usage.

Apple has made a bold move to pull the plug on app makers’ privacy foul play. The new rules now in effect require that every developer provides a clear-cut summary of what types of data their products collect. This is expected to raise users’ awareness of the potential privacy roadblocks they may hit down the road when using a particular application.

Apple’s terrific track record of keeping macOS safe from malicious apps is a double-edged sword. Recent findings of security enthusiasts about a Gatekeeper quirk demonstrate that the trade-off between security and privacy is a nontrivial one. Before elaborating on this issue further, let’s recall what this feature is intended to do in the first place. When a user tries to run an app, it checks the code against a database of known-harmful software.