How do I know if my iMac has been hacked?

dokkentime wrote:

I'm concerned my Mac has been hacked, last night I put my Mac to sleep, this morning it was shut down.

When I put in my name and password it took an abnormally long time to restart, a few minutes, normally it's a few seconds. The screen went black and then it came on.

There were several windows up that I hadn't been using the night before including the Activity Monitor and the Podcast window and a few others.

That's all totally normal, albeit a bit buggy.

Modern versions of macOS are little more than iOS ported to the Mac. As such, one of their features is to restore the entire state from the way it was before the restart. It will reopen apps and previously open documents, even if those documents haven't been saved yet. At least, that's the way it is supposed to work in theory. In practice, after restart, it will sometimes restore some ancient state that you haven't seen for a long time.

The bigger problem here is that you immediately assumed you had been hacked. This is yet another case of successful misinformation. There is a massive push by 3rd party security companies, internet "security researchers", and social media influencers to convince Apple users that their devices are easy to hack, if not already hacked. It's simply not true. The ultimate goal is to reduce your faith in Apple so that you will, instead, put your faith in them and install their "security" software. Once you get to that point, then yes, you have, indeed, been hacked.

Barney-15E wrote:

If there was a way to scan for hackers, there wouldn't be hackers.

That's odd. There are many antivirus apps that scan for malware. Yet for some reason, there is more Mac malware than ever before. Maybe someone should write an app to explicitly scan for hacking activity. I don't know. That sounds difficult. Maybe just read Apple log files, look for any messages that look scary, and show them to the user? That's the ticket!

Hackers are generally proud of their "work". Have you experienced any hacking messages, strange symbols or images, insulting or threatening messages and so forth?

Don't confuse a website telling you you've been hacked vs. actually being hacked. That sort of thing is scamming and phishing.

dokkentime wrote:

I'm concerned my Mac has been hacked, last night I put my Mac to sleep, this morning it was shut down.

When I put in my name and password it took an abnormally long time to restart, a few minutes, normally it's a few seconds. The screen went black and then it came on.

If there was a power failure – even a momentary one – during the night, that would have crashed the machine, and probably would have caused it to take extra time to scan the whole disk ("Disk First Aid", etc.) when you started it up again.

There were several windows up that I hadn't been using the night before including the Activity Monitor and the Podcast window and a few others.

I don't have an explanation for those, unless those applications were in your login items (launch on login) list.

Since then it has been acting normally.

However, it would give me peace of mind if there was a way to scan for hackers.

Thanks for your response.

If there was a way to scan for hackers, there wouldn't be hackers.

Unless someone used a zero-day exploit on you, thus making it known to the world, they would have needed physical access to your Mac. It is possible they could get in through your open sharing services, but they would have needed to be inside your router unless you are on an open public network.

It's not difficult to hack into some routers, and some people never change the username and password for the admin portal.

If non of that applies you your network, the probability that someone hacked your Mac is extremely low.

One common scam is spam e-mail telling you that your computer is infested by some huge number of viruses and that you need to do something right now (like buying a supposed anti-virus product) to fix it.

How would they know? It's scammers, trying to rip you off directly, get information that (or their criminal buddies) can use for identity fraud, or even hoping to connect to your machine and infest it with the malware!

Do you have a cat?

There have been a few reports of cats walking across the keyboard and causing all sorts of strange things. I don't know how they could open an app, though, as it would somehow getting it selected then cmd-O.

What Sharing services do you have enabled in the Sharing section of the General System Settings?

I'm concerned my Mac has been hacked, last night I put my Mac to sleep, this morning it was shut down.

When I put in my name and password it took an abnormally long time to restart, a few minutes, normally it's a few seconds. The screen went black and then it came on.

There were several windows up that I hadn't been using the night before including the Activity Monitor and the Podcast window and a few others.

Since then it has been acting normally.

None of my windows are login items, I never use Podcasts on my Mac, only my iPad. Also a bookmark folder labeled Financial was out of place, it only had financial advice websites, nothing personal but it made me uncomfortable.

Is there a way to scan my Mac to see if it's been hacked?

That's funny about the cat, they're so effortlessly mischievous, but I have no cat and no one else has access. I have DVD/CD, File , Printer and Media sharing enabled.

Nothing unusual has happened in the last few days and nothing mysterious on the Activity Monitor so I guess it was just an anomaly.

However, it would give me peace of mind if there was a way to scan for hackers.

Thanks for your response.

The question is what makes you think your computer has been hacked. Please provide more details.