Mac adware has seen a huge spike in early 2020 and the trend keeps making itself felt. Whilst there are numerous active families of these threats, one of them is literally swarming into the wild with spinoffs that are replicas of one another, for the most part. CrowdExclusive is an app that represents this syndicate. It displays annoying ads on websites and may redirect the browser to a fake search engine or junk services, making the victim stuck in unwanted web traffic.

Malicious apps that diminish a Mac user’s Internet surfing experience through browser hijacking are growingly common. Arriving with a harmless-looking software bundle, such an infection will impose rogue web preferences to make the victim visit an unwanted junk site over and over. Feed Chunk App is a typical threat falling into this malware cluster. It redirects the traffic to feed.chunckapp.com page to push another notorious virus-riddled service called Safe Finder.

Falling victim to a browser hijacker is both a nuisance in terms of the symptoms and a drag when it comes to the fix. Although these threats don’t really damage anything on a Mac, they sprinkle their numerous components around the system to prevent accurate detection and effective removal. Binarymove is the name of a new adware strain that skews one’s web browsing defaults and redirects the traffic to junk and malicious sites without taking the user approval route.

Plug-ins can be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they enable a bevy of features so that Mac users aren’t limited in their activities and the range of online materials they can view and access. On the other hand, though, a plug-in can be a weak link in one’s security set-up if it’s crudely designed or heavily targeted by malicious actors. To keep users safe, Apple may disable such known-vulnerable entities, displaying “Blocked Plug-in” alerts. These messages can also be shown by malware to tout additional infections.

Just like any other operating system, macOS encompasses a plethora of not-so-prominent directories that manage various configuration parameters. These objects aren’t intended for routine edits by the user, nor are they visible anywhere in the Dock or other conspicuous elements of the graphical user interface. An object called com.apple.tcc fits the mold of these maintenance-related items many Mac fans are clueless about. However, it may come to the fore in certain scenarios as a source of security issues.

Some Mac applications do what’s promised, but some only pretend to be useful. The activity of Advanced Mac Cleaner definitely doesn’t exceed the primitive mimicking of optimization as it reports inexistent issues. The mix of intimidation and deceit, as viewed by this app’s authors, is the right marketing strategy to ensure license purchases in exchange for dummy cleanup of the host system.