Looking for advice on how best to get rid of a trojan. My father-in-law was complaining that Safari “quit working.” Upon inspection, I noticed right away that Yahoo Search / “Safe Finder” was running every time a search was run. There were no extensions in the Safari preferences that I could delete (and his search engine preference was set to Google). A bit of sleuthing led me to a system profile for CapitalSearchDaemon. I deleted it, rebooted, installed Norton (I’m not a fan…but for his sake, I think it’s a good thing). Norton found a couple of trojans - but the searches are still getting highjacked. He’s running Mojave.
I’m VERY wary of the so called “safe cleaners” and haven’t run any of them. And, in 30+ years of owning Macs, I can’t recall ever having a trojan on one of my Macs…so, I’m at a loss (Google didn’t help…just offered lots of “cleaner” apps). . Any suggestions?
Malwarebytes seems to do a pretty good job of finding nasty stuff. It’s free, although there is a premium upgrade available that let’s you automate scheduling of scans and “realtime protection”. I’ve just used the free version though.
I contact Apple customer services. They are really very good.
I had a similar problem and they told me to use Malware Bytes, so probably isn’t any better.
Get rid of Norton as it does very little which is confirmed with your experience. Norton like most Anti Virus programs just deletes the original file containing the installer of the problem and doesn’t fix the actual problem. Avoid all Mac Clearners as they often cause harm and introduce more problems such as altering your search settings.
Just as others have said, use the free during the initial trial MalwareBytes to scan, reboot, scan again and then scan every day for a week. Then you can remove MalwareBytes. The paid for version has tended to be a bit intrusive with warnings in the past and also it is overkill on a Mac IMHO.
This “trojan” most likely got installed with a downloaded app or an infected app that was then given permission to install.
Thanks everyone- I had no idea Malwarebytes existed for the Mac. I’ll download it this evening and fix his “broken Safari.” I really appreciate the suggestions!
Done - by the way! It took about 30 seconds to scan his entire hard drive and fix the issue. I then deleted the app since I know at his age (and lack of technical skills), that he eventually would have forked over the money to buy it. Many, many thanks for the suggestion!