Is MacKeeper a legitimate program?

That download had nothing to do with Flash. You installed adware. Hopefully, nothing more severe than that. MacKeeper is not on your Mac, but they are heavy users of such advertising.

Download and run MalwareBytes for Mac. It will look for and offer to remove any such junk it finds.

In the future, never, ever believe any site that claims you need to download anything from them to use their site. Any such message is a lie, almost, but not quite 100% of the time. Legitimate messages will tell you to visit Adobe to get Flash. There are no legitimate messages of any kind that insist you download and install software from them.

The one and only place to acquire the Flash Player, or to update it if you already have it installed is directly from Adobe.

Thanks Kurt! Thought it was a media flash player to make a new car teacher add run. Good advise going directly to Adobe site. Interesting that all that megabackup cloud and mackeeper was installed on my doc, but now uninstalled. I'll run your suggested MalwareBytes for Mac

I've never had an issue before - Thanks!

It is malware

No, it's not. It's a legitimate app that has numerous major strikes going against it. Here's at least a few.

1) It's poorly written garbage that is well known to, and proven to hose many systems that were fine before running this app.

2) It doesn't do anything you can't do with other apps that are free, or can be done with functions already available in the OS.

3) The company's marketing tactics aren't just aggressive, they're heavily misleading, and outright fraudulent. The last being proven by the app's insistence of finding many "major" problems that needs to be fixed on a new Mac fresh out of the box.

4) The company selling this garbage has had two class action lawsuits brought against it. They lost both. Here's a note on one of them. In their favorite excuse, it's always the affiliates fault for all of the adware and other heavily pushed methods of getting users to buy it. Well, they pay the affiliates for the advertising. So who's fault is it?

I am going to jump in and say haw bad my experience was with Mackeeper. I bought it two days ago and one of their techs installed it. He spent a lot of time trying to convince me to upgrade me to a higher level of Mackeeper for an additional $100.00. IMHO if the software you are selling for 59.00 do not try and upgrade someone to a better software.

I believe that at the time of installation he opened me up to several viruses to convince me to upgrade. It ****** me off and I got my money back. They want to remove the virus but I would not let that company go into my computer again. I use Avast and there has never been a problem. I am going to report this to the FBI because this is illegal activity.

I have had a mac for 40 years. Never had a problem before.

I removed this app - it installed on my machine without my prompting which made me extremely nervous. I did some research and I saw it may be allegedely associated to other foreign and possibly russian companies. So better to be safe than sorry in my book.

This is the day i switched from a 500gb hard drive to a 1 tb hard drive.

Wiki can be edited by anyone.

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Here's a search of the app store for mackeeper.

When Mackeeper Software locks up your computer until you click on a paid service or force shutdown your system, it is NOT LEGIT.

Balanced? LOL! 😀

I have no vested interest in the product, nor do I ride a hobby horse.

Well Helen, at least you stand out from the crowd! 🙂

I would be imterested in knowing exactly who the developers have paid. We should know, or how can we make informed decisions. They should be named.

This begs the question "Is there a legitimate, SAFE, utility for the Mac that the Mac Community recommends as an alternative to MacKeeper?"

Most of the functions MacKeeper performs are either absolutely unnecessary or can be accomplished with free software. See Beware MacKeeper.

The general concensus is that you need no utility at all. At times when you get that irrational fear (I get it) that something is amiss, ClamXav is as much as you need.