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MacKeeper Exposes Data on 13 Million Customers

larrylaffer said:
The part of this story that shocks is that 13 million fell for their scam.
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This is a myth--MacKeeper is NOT a scam. Go to Wikipedia and see the links to respectable Mac publications. They DO have egregious, aggressive advertising, but the product is legit, and so is the company.

Some people may be confusing this with a similarly-named program, MacDefender, which really was malware.
 
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ArtOfWarfare said:
Not so much that as the people with accounts probably already had their credentials stolen by some other means. Anyone dumb enough to sign up for Mac Keeper is probably dumb enough to fall for any random phishing attempt.

IE, just the other day I got a random call on my phone.

"Hi, I'm from tech support. I'm calling to help with your Windows computer. Are you the admin of your Windows computer?"

I stopped them there asking for more details (which they didn't provide) such as whose tech support. I don't doubt the next thing they would have asked for would have been some combination of my username, password, and email address.
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IIRC, they'll ask you to install a remote access program (e.g. TeamViewer) so that they can dick around with your computer, ask for payment ($299 and up), and foul things up even more if you don't give them your credit card number.

https://blog.malwarebytes.org/tech-support-scams
 
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ArtOfWarfare said:
IE, just the other day I got a random call on my phone.

"Hi, I'm from tech support. I'm calling to help with your Windows computer. Are you the admin of your Windows computer?"

I stopped them there asking for more details (which they didn't provide) such as whose tech support. I don't doubt the next thing they would have asked for would have been some combination of my username, password, and email address.
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I got one of those. I sounded very concerned and told them my "son" handles all the computers in the house, I don't know how to use them, and asked if I could get a phone number for him to call them back. They gave me one. LA area code...
 
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Swordylove said:
Can this company, software and their ads die already?
I think Apple should include a note with every Mac purchase to tell the mac newbies to avoid this crap at all cost!
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Believe me when I say that it's not newbies who have this problem. I've seen people have this same issue multiple times and they refuse to do anything to protect themselves.
 
ArtOfWarfare said:
Not so much that as the people with accounts probably already had their credentials stolen by some other means. Anyone dumb enough to sign up for Mac Keeper is probably dumb enough to fall for any random phishing attempt.

IE, just the other day I got a random call on my phone.

"Hi, I'm from tech support. I'm calling to help with your Windows computer. Are you the admin of your Windows computer?"

I stopped them there asking for more details (which they didn't provide) such as whose tech support. I don't doubt the next thing they would have asked for would have been some combination of my username, password, and email address.
Click to expand...

the existence of mackeeper proves that people are sheep. therefore they deserve it and mackeeper should be praised.
 
Gasu E. said:
You're pr



This is a myth--MacKeeper is NOT a scam. Go to Wikipedia and see the links to respectable Mac publications. They DO have egregious, aggressive advertising, but the product is legit, and so is the company.

Some people may be confusing this with a similarly-named program, MacDefender, which really was malware.
Click to expand...

Um what? As an ACMT tech doing this work for over five years, I can tell you this software is not only unnecessary but potentially dangerous. To say this software is "legit" is dubious at best
 
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larrylaffer said:
The part of this story that shocks is that 13 million fell for their scam.
Click to expand...

My thoughts exactly, they buried the lead in this article.

"Ubiquitous spam king Mackeeper accrues 13 million victims, explaining long running mystery of how they can run so much advertising"

"In related news, the pervasive malware company obviously suffered a recent 'hack' where the perpetrator just walked in an open door."
 
larrylaffer said:
The part of this story that shocks is that 13 million fell for their scam.
Click to expand...

Well, not really... I'd guess 80% or more of them were noobs. With the Mac attracting confused Windows users and neophytes, many of who were eager to protect themselves from malware were drawn to MacKeepers purported bells and whistles. These trumped up claims were validated by proxy by just being advertised on several "reputable" Mac sites. For years people have been saying how horrible the program was. Unfortunately they didn't browbeat MacKeeper enough to make their program go away!
 
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Gasu E. said:
You're pr



This is a myth--MacKeeper is NOT a scam. Go to Wikipedia and see the links to respectable Mac publications. They DO have egregious, aggressive advertising, but the product is legit, and so is the company.

Some people may be confusing this with a similarly-named program, MacDefender, which really was malware.
Click to expand...
The product doesn't do anything but ask for money and make itself impossible to remove.
 
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sudo1996 said:
I avoid any kind of "optimization" tool. Not worth the risk of it being illegit or, even more likely, just ineffective. Even if it works, it could cause havoc with OS updates. Seems that my Mac should be working optimally out of the box anyway. The only thing I've installed is TRIM Enabler because I've got a third-party SSD, so my Mac is neither "out of the box" nor fully Apple-supported, and I'm perfectly aware of why I need TRIM Enabler for it.
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But you do know that you don't need TRIM Enabler anymore?
https://www.macrumors.com/2015/06/12/os-x-el-capitan-trim-support/

I also wish OS X worked fine without third party tools, but some of them makes certain things easier to do and some are of great value like DiskWarrior that has fixed bad HFS (yes, I'm old) and HFS+ directories on so many drives over the years both for me personally and at work. We also have FontNuke which has helped me at work clearing font caches – which of course can be done manually – but is easier to do in one go using that tool.

So, as long as some caution and understanding of what the software do is present, I think it's fine to use third party tools. Many (most) work well and do what they're supposed to.
 
I used mac keeper within a year of switching to an iMac 2011, not as an antivirus but as an optimisation tool.
Why would I want to optimise a top of the range iMac?
In real world tests Macs don't always run very well. I became increasingly concerned about the lag, slow loading from login and boot times for larger apps.

MacKeeper did a lot to show me how much extraneous data there is on a hard drive and was a convincing product to use.

After a month I tried to remove it, that was six hours I will never see again. I share others concerns that MacKeeper never made a difference and that it has made a lot of money by providing very little.

Perhaps if OSX was as reliable as we are led to believe by the glossy adverts, people would not buy in to such a product. I still regularly clean my machine by emptying the cache and running First Aid on my disk. I still often end up waiting for minutes after switch on for my Mac for it to settle down and get to work.

Perhaps, just perhaps, there are 13 million people who have had similar experiences.

On a positive note I have just got into FCPX and that has been super reliable. Movie editing on a PC was always a lottery.
 
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Well that’s ironic.

I’d like to think this will finally stop them from getting new customers, except almost by definition they prey on the uneducated and inexperienced as their entire business model, so it’s unlikely that the infamy of a massive hack will actually impact their potential customer base much if at all. If you know little enough to buy MacKeeper, you aren’t going to hear that they got hacked.

The only hope is that the cost of dealing with the 13 million people who got suckered in by them will drive them out of business.
 
Anti-virus company MacKeeper?? MacKeeper is spam and a virus by itself. Don't understand that these basterds are still in the market. Probably, they leaked the information on purpose.

After installing add block I haven't seen many pop-ups of these losers anymore.
 
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Knighstalker said:
Well, not really... I'd guess 80% or more of them were noobs. With the Mac attracting confused Windows users and neophytes, many of who were eager to protect themselves from malware were drawn to MacKeepers purported bells and whistles. These trumped up claims were validated by proxy by just being advertised on several "reputable" Mac sites. For years people have been saying how horrible the program was. Unfortunately they didn't browbeat MacKeeper enough to make their program go away!
Click to expand...
I think you've exactly summed up their target market & how their saturating advertising works. All my friends who've moved from PC's to Mac's cant get their head around the fact that they don't need to install this kind of garbage on their macs & are drawn to mackeeper by the mass marketing & thinking they're getting a good 'bang for their buck'!
 
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Watch for attempts to connect to Shodan.io with Little Snitch and block them.

Basically Shodan.io is a reverse Google. It looks to probe every IP address on the internet. It sends out requests to each and looks for responses. Your Mac (and any computer) will look to send a response which then allows Shodan.io to index it and add it to the list of available open ports and active IPs.

If you have Little Snitch, it will prompt you that whatever task is trying to connect to some random IP. If you hit the button to lookup the IP and it comes back to Shodan.io, select to deny forever. Screw letting them add you to their database and someone using their list to attack those known IPs.
 
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