MrHoffman wrote:
This intending absolutely no shade toward EtreCheck too, as detecting malware simply isn’t its focus. It is a configuration and software inventory tool, and most malware would probably prefer to avoid being included in one of the most commonly-used inventory tools.
Malware detection is one of EtreCheck's primary features. As far as I can tell, EtreCheck is able to detect more malware than any traditional "security" app.
There is no built-in "inventory" of known apps. EtreCheck just reports what it finds on each machine. Rather than scanning for a known list of malware signatures, EtreCheck looks for a number of known malware behaviours. EtreCheck is more likely to emit false positives because of this. One page of EtreCheck's Insights feature takes reports that show when both a bona-fide (non-false-positive) malware file and a known "security" app are running side-by-side, and uses the output to rate the effectiveness of these "security" apps. Most of the more popular apps are slightly better than having no 3rd party malware protection at all. Some of the less popular apps aren't listed, but are strongly correlated with having more malware than with those reports showing no 3rd party malware protection.
To this day, there are an awful lot of people using EtreCheckPro to detect, and hopefully remove, malware. These people do prefer to keep their activity private. I very rarely see any evidence of malware in EtreCheck reports posted here in the forums, or in support message. But I still see strong malware activity on the backend with my most recent data (December 2025) showing 18.4% of submitted reports having malware installed. Given that accompanying silence about it, my theory is that these people know where they got their malware, but don't want to talk about it.
Alas, EtreCheck malware detection and removal will soon be gone. While I think highly of it, clearly no one else does. And this is sincerely intending no shade to MrHoffman. He's not one of the people I was referring to. All in all, EtreCheck's "security" features, powerful as they are, are generally unappreciated, cause lots of problems, and have been a source of significant net-negative revenue. And I need more money.
