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One of the oldest and most transparent anti-virus programs is the fake antivirus program, which gullible users are asked to download with panicked banners and an FBI email stating that "your cybers are infected and need to be cleaned up" . The crew of Clooney comes dressed as the cops in the Oceans movies, and normally it only works for people who are still running Windows XP.
But according to a former NSA hacker turned security researcher, an application called Adware Doctor – which is the most profitable paid application in the Utilities section of the Mac App Store – secretly steals users' browsing history without the tell them. If his report (via TechCrunch) Exactly, Apple is aware of the malicious behavior for weeks, but it has still not done anything about it.
Patrick Wardle, the aforementioned security researcher, has published a report on Adware Doctor on his blog. It assigns confidentiality to the Twitter 1 user by noticing the problem, but it does a thorough scan to find out how Adware Doctor steals your browsing history and where it sends the data.
According to his analysis, Adware Doctor reviews a number of stories to steal and then download your browser's history from Chrome, Safari and Firefox; the data is then compressed and defined on a server in China, where something is done with. This, as he explains clearly, is any unethical behavior:
At no moment Doctor Adware ask to see the history of your browser. And his access to this very private data is clearly based on misleading the user.
Beyond its poor treatment and its flagrant lack of respect for user data, the fact that Doctor Adware "Dancing around" the Sandbox Mac App seems clearly to be another violation. For example, the fact that Apple blocks the invocation of ps illustrates that sandboxed applications should not list processes running in the sandbox. If an application developer finds this way, it is always a violation.
More worrisome than the specific abuse, here's how Adware Doctor has managed to conceal its malicious intentions with the supposed security waterproof Apple. Apple is famous for its "walled garden" of applications and every downloadable application in Apple's official stores has – in theory! – been checked to make sure it complies with Apple's rules. Not only did Adware Doctor successfully pass the review process, but Apple still does not seem to have taken any steps to remove the app from its store, even though Wardle has informed Apple of his behavior a month ago.
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