iTunes launches randomly, and annoyingly

/etc/hosts file - Fixing a hacked

/etc/hosts File - How to Restore the Original Default 

I would get rid of Trusteer. It doesn’t work well under Mac OS. Type uninstall in the search field.

Trusteer Rapport Uninstall

SIMBL is a system hack. Try removing it.

SIMBL Uninstall     See solution posted by Linc Davis .

Post the EtreCheck. Open a reply here, press the button that looks like a printed page to get a text input box that’s large enough to paste the hardware and software configuration report here. The list of usual suspects for weird behavior includes anti-malware, and a few other bits.

I’ve also seen weak mouse and trackpad batteries do odd stuff, and I’ve met a Bluetooth device under a pile of papers that launched stuff. It’s also possible to set up a shortcut that launches an app.

OS X 10.11 is getting pretty old, and an upgrade can be reasonable—if your apps and your hardware can support that.

Yeah, this system is old and looks to have accreted over the years. That happens to many systems, too.

That does tend to be problematic though, as updates are installed and other updates are not installed.

Three anti-malware packages, simbl, gatekeeper off, tools for cooling system overrides, Silverlight, Flash, oddly-smaller sudoers, missing hunks of apps...

Other stuff is chewing a fair amount of processor time in this snapshot, too.

I’d back up, back up again, wipe, and then migrate just the documents, and then re-install what apps you currently need.

Backup.Wipe. Reload OS X.

Reload OS X, not restore the backup.

Migrate just documents, not apps.

Reinstall necessary apps from backups or from (more) current distributions manually.

Don’t load what you no longer need.

Answer or not, nuke-and-pave is easy and fast, and it resolves cases where older systems have accumulated.

Spending time and effort to determine the trigger on older systems often led to re-debugging old and long-fixed bugs, and still left me needing to re-install, or to upgrade.

The Migration Assistant stuff works quite well, too. Having used it many times.

The fiction that a (networked) computer can be or is static is popular too, yes. Anti-malware gets updates. Networks and peers and protocols change. Corruptions arise.

Worse for everybody, old and insecure systems are targeted using automated tools, breached, and then these victim systems see various “new” uses such as forwarding spam, distributed denials of service attacks, network relays, etc. And that’s,after credentials and financials and related are harvested.

I suspect that was some.confusion between the hosts and the sudoers file.

It’s the latter that’s getting flagged here, and not the former.