My MacBook was draining fast due to a virus that was draining fast. Here is how I fixed it

To maintain battery health while working on the MacBook Pro 16 on the M1 Pro processor, you must always be connected to the network through the included charger.

According to observations, this way of eating does not harm if you keep the capacity around 70%.

Recently, for the first time in two months, I worked on battery power. Suddenly, the battery was draining at such a rate that all my theories and experiments over the past year and a half in an attempt to show the resource as a useless exercise.

With a 100% laptop battery, there is 2 hours. Forced termination of programs did not solve the issue, useful to understand. Super apps built into macOS helped.

Color decision but non-obvious. Had to spend explored.

Briefly about the problem

Installed three years ago, Disk Drill turned into a virus with ads that slowly restarted and drained battery power.

To calculate it exactly, it turned out:

1. Through Activity monitoring track down a process that consumes a lot of energy.

2. Find this process in Consoles under the “Battle Reports” section.

3. Google the data you found.

4. Remove the program and disable what is left of it from working in the background.

5. Find the complete removal command and enter in Terminal.

👉 But for most it is enough disable running in the background through Settings > Main > Login objects > Allow in background.

Now more about each step, so that you can act on the mechanisms.

Heavyweight programs were closed

It happens that I slammed my laptop with Photoshop, Lightroom and Safari for 100 deposits, so it’s not surprising that it took ten percent overnight. But not all 30% of the same!

An experiment was carried out and all active applications were closed. To do this, go to the menu Apple  in the left corner of the screen, click Finish guessing…selected all running processes and pressed Complete.

Did not help. The next two days, the battery was still going to sit down after two hours, and overnight it took from 15% to 30%.

Moved to the second stage.

System monitoring showed strange activity

Built-in System Monitor

Okay, let’s switch to manual mode.

Obviously, it consumes a lot of energy, and convenient tools are built into macOS for this.

I went into System monitoring and selected tab Energy. Further sorted by energy impact and infected data. Here, all system requests and the loading status of the simulation chip are displayed in real time.

From time to time, a strange process popped up in the very top Report a crash.

Turns out I’m not the only one with this condition.

The downside is that you can not see the source that is responsible for the executable furniture.

But the name hints: a one-persistent application breaks somewhere.

Virus error log

Embedded program Console

If Activity Monitor shows running processes, application Console keeps a record of messages that are installed on macOS.

And then I saw an interesting list.

On the morning of August 10, when the problem became especially acute, and the MacBook lost 30% overnight, the same error occurred more than twenty times.

Logical destinations on a path that involved names CleverFiles And BackService.app.

A simple Google search revealed that BackService is a virus that shows more ads in the browser. And this is the problem I’ve been having lately.

And here is CleverFiles of the first line in the search engine, unexpectedly selected for the Disk Drill program, which I installed back in May 2020 on my last 2018 MacBook Pro.

trigger happened now, impossible. On the hands of only guesswork.

Prohibited work in the background with one setting

Although I encountered a virus, it even has to ask permission to work on macOS.

First of all, of course, we removed the program using the old method through the “Programs” folder.

Further I went into Settings > Main > Login objects > Allow in background. Went through all the suspicious tumblersincluding from programs with familiar names, I meet I do not use. Disabled their.

As it turned out, Disk Drill stayed right there after being removed from Launchpad.

Cleaned the system through the Terminal

Built-in terminal program. Although the post-release publication says no data found, the background run feature in setup is gone

On the official website of the developer, no matter how strange it may sound, a terminal command is given that freely erases the remnants of applications.

sudo /Volumes/DiskDrill/Disk\ Drill.app/Contents/Resources/delete

After that, the last traces of the suspicious virus were gone.

As it turned out, prevention should be carried out even on a MacBook. Who knew that after three years and one device change, he “shot” with the help of a cultural program for finding lost files.

So open up Settingsgo to background tasks and includes all non-refundable garbage.