Publicadvisesearch in activity monitor

Now I understand. The process was owned by root (meaning, it was running with superuser privileges) and invoked by launchd. Neither one is surprising since otherwise it couldn't do very much.

Those things are generally installed at /Library/LaunchDaemons/ and are easily removed. It's important to know that nothing gets installed there without your consent, although malware deceives you into doing that: How to install adware - Apple Community.

I was able to clean it out by downloading and running the free trial of MalwareBytes , suggested by a user in the thread for PathBrand.app.

I have this problem also. It started on May 17th, like yours did. There was a sequence of events that might be involved:

1) On May 16th,  one of the kids downloaded a free game from the App Store called BasketballGeneralManager.app (he has an account on my iMac, with parental controls set).  

2) The next time I woke the computer, there was a textbox on the login screen to the effect that “PublicAdviseSearch needs your AppleID password, or the app won’t work correctly”.  I closed this window without entering the password and logged in.

3) Then I noticed a new icon in the Dock, labeled PathBrand.app.  I looked in the Applications folder, and saw BasketballGeneralManager.app and PathBrand.app. I moved PathBrand.app into the Trash.  At that time, I assumed the password request had to do with that app.

4) Then my Internet access stalled, and I looked into the Activity Manager and found root-owned PublicAdviseSearch sending and receiving packets. The list showed two processes labeled PublicAdviseSearch and one process labeled PublicAdviseSearchDaemon, owned by launchd(1). Any attempt to kill these processes results in them relaunching a second or two later.

Radi8n wrote:

Curious if anyone has ever seen this file in the root folder? ...

This is may not be the culprit, but I have never seen this before and I cannot find this file to remove it.

I'm a little confused because you wrote it's a file in the root folder, implying the root level of your startup disk, yet you can't find it. Describe exactly where you are seeing it.

If you are finding it in Activity Monitor, what happens if you kill the process? I'm assuming it just spontaneously reappears. I will be able to provide additional suggestions contingent upon your answers.

To be clear it is never required to download anything, install anything, or spend money on anything to eradicate such things. If you want to do that it's up to you, but it is certainly not required.

Beware bogus Adobe Flash "installers" - Apple Inc.

Those things are disturbingly common: Beware bogus Adobe Flash "installers"

I doubt it was directly installed by an App Store game, but like many others the one in question offers "in-app purchases" that can be an invitation to malware. Who knows what it was doing, but now that it's gone I wouldn't be concerned.

I also fell for the flash player update "scam" and experienced the same very annoying problems. There were 7 files associated with the bug. I used the Antivirus Zap app from the app store. I never would have found all 7 files on my own, so it was worth the $9.99 to me! I'm certain any anti-virus app would solve the issue.