How to know if your MacBook has spyware and how to remove it

As we said in the introduction, the fact that there is spyware on a MacBook is something much more remote than on other devices and operating systems.

In most cases, it is caused by the user himself and not by the computer, as it may happen that the download is done, which should not be done, click on the link where it was better to skip it, or open the file attached to the infected email, among other similar situations.

If something like this happens to us, we may have come across some kind of malware that is responsible for intensively monitoring our activities, collecting our passwords, the names of the people we interact with, and the like. That is to jeopardize our privacy.

The bad news for us is that this type of program hides itself extremely effectively and, at first, we will not notice anything in the system, so everything will seem normal to us while this software is running in the background.

It is especially difficult to make everything free of these programs again, especially if we cannot know that they are present in our operating system.

But if we know what we should look for and where we can find it, we can fix the problem and make sure that this malware is no longer present on our MacBook.

What is more than clear is that we must have some guidelines both for detection and for the rest of the operations that we will have to carry out so that in our Apple we do not have any programs that can cause us problems or steal confidential information.

How to find spyware on a MacBook?

When we have a MacBook we can interpret some indicators as whistleblowers that we might have spyware on the system.

If you notice that your computer is slower than usual, if you see some files or browser extensions that you do not remember installing, if the browser suddenly sets a different start page than the one we used for it, or if the MacBook tells us about security flaws even when we’re not looking, so we might have spyware.

You can try checking it manually when performance drops, like so:

• We are open Applicationsafter Utilities then go to activity tracker or directly search activity tracker in the Finder search bar.
• We double click on the application to open it.
• now in the field process name, located on the CPU tab (which should be selected by default), we check what is listed and what percentage of the CPU is required to work.

• If we are unsure of any process names, we simply type them into the Google search engine and we will know what they are and what they are used for.
• The moment we find the type of malware, in the activity monitor, click on the item and then select button x in the top left corner to finish.
• Also open the tab. Memory and parse the section process name to see if there are names we don’t know. You just need to look at the ones that use the most memory.

We can also check the applications installed on the MacBook to make sure nothing strange is installed on the computer.

To achieve this, you must do the following:

• We open the folder Applications which is located on the left sidebar of the Finder.
• At this time, we must look for any application that we have not installed ourselves.
• We click on controller + [Programa] and we choose Move to cart.
• Remember Empty trash permanently remove the unwanted application from the system.
• Next, it is convenient to go to the folder Downloads for Mac and remove everything we didn’t upload ourselves. As in the previous case, we must not forget to empty the Trash if you delete any particular file.

We have another option configure firewall so you can set computer activity. You can also activate firewall protection at the entrance security and privacy in system presence.

Once activated, we can customize it so that you can manage apps and services in a certain way, even by activating stealth modeto make it harder to find our computer.

Get rid of spyware

The most effective way at the moment to completely get rid of any malware on a MacBook is to completely reformat it.

To do this, we must do the following:

• Reboot the MacBook and immediately clamp Command + P start at recovery mode.
• We choose disk utility D we erase the hard drive. Please note that this removes spyware as well as all other files, applications, and settings on your computer.
• The best thing to do backup what we need before reformatting.

If we don’t want to do something drastic like this, it’s better to have latest system updates to date because many of them are direct solutions against this type of software.

We can also try close spyware (provided that we have it and we know what it is), through activity trackerfrom manual way D delete it like we do with any other program.

From the same place we can also look for malware in the system and put it in the cart as soon as we find it, we immediately delete it so that it does not remain there.

As you may have already read, we will be able to identify spyware and eliminate it also on our MacBook, although the Apple system is the least affected by this type of software.

No action is difficult to perform, but, as is the case with any operating system, once infected, it is not so easy to identify and completely remove these programs that can cause us so much damage, especially in terms of privacy.