Advanced Mac Cleaner, a sleek-looking impostor

Advanced Mac Cleaner, a sleek-looking impostor

Long gone are the days when rogue antispyware and pseudo optimization software were at the top of the malware hierarchy. Over the years, these mild-impact infections have been superseded by more sophisticated ones, such as file-encrypting ransomware and cryptocurrency mining viruses. That notwithstanding, scareware is still around and for some reason thrives within the Mac environment for the most part. The application called Advanced Mac Cleaner, for instance, is balancing on the ultra-thin fringe between legitimacy and malignancy. A lot of Mac users and industry experts consider it to be a rogue optimizer, and these opinions are not ungrounded.

The first thing evoking distrust is the way this utility makes the rounds. Few, if any, people knowingly install it from the official website. Meanwhile, many end up installing it. How can this disparity possibly exist? The answer is simple: the makers of Advanced Mac Cleaner tend to spread their controversial product by means of bundling. Whereas this technique isn’t malicious at all, it is one of malware authors’ favorite distribution tactics. The sucker punch consists in the incorporation of potentially unwanted programs into installation clients available on various questionably ethical download hubs online. This inclusion isn’t properly disclosed, so Mac users have no idea they are getting an aggressive extra alongside some benign freeware.

Having slithered its way into a system, Advanced Mac Cleaner deploys an unstoppable brainwashing activity. It generates multiple annoying alerts that report hundreds or even thousands of Mac performance issues related to system and Internet junk, duplicate files, rogue apps, redundant cache and the like. In order to fix those, the user is instructed to apply a cleanup and thus allegedly boost their machine’s performance. The catch is that this feature presupposes license activation through payment. All in all, this app gets in unannounced, reports fake problems and tries to persuade victims into wasting money. Such a culprit, obviously, does not belong on a Mac and should be uninstalled.