mac os x virus: genio

Well, tr, it's like this..,

These invasions of our systems do damage. They corrupt files, reset permissions, etc., which you in your vast experience can address better than I can. So, once we find a way to remove the pernicious malcontents, we need to repair the damage. Cleaning is often not enough, to that I can attest. So, tools like TinkerTools provide a solution to problems that linger, in my case slower speeds, more frequent and higher fan settings, more problems with crashing programs. I hope you are less puzzled now, than before.

GG

GullyGypsum wrote:

I hope you are less puzzled now, than before.

Not really. First, there is no evidence whatsoever that adware like Genieo causes file corruption, permissions problems or anything else along those lines. I've played with quite a few copies of Genieo, and have never seen that.

Further, the kind of "cleaning" that you're talking about is not only unnecessary for the most part, except in very specific circumstances, but is also not a solution for removing something like Genieo at all.

If someone did want to do such "cleaning" after removing adware like Genieo, it's not going to hurt anything as a one-time thing, but there's no need to spend $20 on that. The free Onyx will do the job just as well.

Well, color me surprised.

Genio is just one:

ADManager

KOVIA

JAVPRO

Vuze

JASMIN

MacKeeper

[Many if not most apps downloaded from the web from Latvia, Ukraine or Russian Republic]

Not to mention the Fishing Virus's sent to us by financial institutions in their emails, like Capital One and Bank of America.

I seem to have the same experiences of thousands of other Mac users regarding the benefits of certain cleaning and repair packages They work. For repair, Onyx is an OK product, but does not compare to TinkerTools or Applejack in it's day. Properly used, cleaning software does indeed improve performance, like CCleaner for a more sophisticated user, CleanApp for less knowledgable but learning types, or even DetoxMyMac for some small removals by a novice user. Most are free or can be purchased under $20. As for the $20 for TinkerTools, it's a best buy for anyone who needs the uptime for business useage of their Mac, which is me. I'm on one or more Macs 10+ hours a day to generate income for my company. This is my 34th year on a PC, 30th year on a Mac, 22 models. In the difficult but well endowed World of MS Windows these analagous products are a way of life. Apple is slow to admit how much we really encounter invasive, damaging junk. But that's the modern Apple.

Tell me thomas, why is it you have such a bias against cleaning, and so adamant about DIY repair work? I'm sure a bright guy like you doesn't have a bias against hygiene in general 🙂 Did you try it and lose a disk full of irreplacable data?

I don't know what that list of apps is supposed to mean, or why it surprises you.

As for my "bias against cleaning," if you don't believe me when I say it's unnecessary, perhaps you would believe what Marcel Bresink, the maker of TinkerTool, has to say about it:

http://www.bresink.com/osx/300321023/Docs-en/pgs/0510-TMaintenance.html

Ahh thomas my boy, now you're just playing with me😉

The list, is all the bad guys needing to be dislodged, and the after effects cleaned and repaired. As for Mr. Bresink, lets face it, he didn't go to the trouble to author a grand piece of code, and sell it, so not to have people use it, and for him to make money,now did he? No, this is one smart man.

I think everything is good between my philosophy and that of Mr. Bresink. I don’t advocate regular cleaning of one's computer if it isn't having problems, or everyday even if it is. Finding the problem is most important. I think it's summed up pretty well with these statements he's made:

Cleaning caches can be an important troubleshooting procedure in case your computer is indeed suffering from a software problem...

WHICH MINE HAS IN THE PAST, AND WILL IN THE FUTURE.

For users operating their computers as desktop systems, this type of regular maintenance might not be important, however....

This does not mean that Mac OS X would not need any maintenance at all...

There can be several causes for technical problems with a computer running Mac OS X, which make maintenance necessary:

• Early versions of the operating system may contain defects (“bugs”) which have not been fixed yet.
• The operating system can contain general design flaws which are not planned to be fixed, but are causing problems nevertheless.
• Badly written installation software of third-party vendors has damaged parts of the system.

LIKE THOSE I QUOTED EARLIER, e.g., Vuze, MacKeeper, etc.

• While working with administrative permissions, you have made a mistake in operating the machine.
• You like to use advanced features of the system, but don’t have the necessary skills to activate them on the UNIX command-line.

In all these cases, TinkerTool System can assist you.

I heartily agree with the last statement. Cheers

GG

Whether I agree with you on the topic of using TinkerTool to do cleaning or not - which has rapidly become a tired subject - that's irrelevant to the issue at hand. TinkerTool does not remove Genieo. Further, all those other "bad" apps you mention are not in any way related to TinkerTool or Genieo.

whats funny is people here advising others to go try Dr.Web light to solve this problem, which is a bit WORSE then genieo when it comes to actually damaging your hard drive, it has a memory bug or should i say uses so much memory to share whats on your drive via backdoors, it goes straight to the ROOT.

Look at the screenshot, drwebd, user= root, using almost 1GB of real ram 20 x until your computer slows down to a crawl, if you force quit the processes nothing happens., only pulling the plug to the INTERNET stops these processes, i mean literally pulling the plug on the router, you cant even shut wifi off, i tried and it took 8 minutes just to see the menu and by the time it did it was gone in a sec.

Genieo whatever its called is a Israeli app, a news app reporting news about your personal profile., nothing to do with Israel, Google and other companies do it all the time and claim its customer research.

What this app can do is corrupt your cloud data, we just learned this about several external hard drives., how exactly depends on the files (scripts) in the root, one of the behaviors is it changes your login both on the computer user profile and iCloud, this way you cant login with your password, it LOCKS up the drive completely leaving Disk Utilities guessing it is damaged because it see no S.M.A.R.T drive functions.

capnb00b00 wrote:

whats funny is people here advising others to go try Dr.Web light to solve this problem...

Not sure why you are posting to a discussion that's almost eighteen months old but nobody here mentioned Dr.Web Light at all, let alone recommended it's use. Your allegations could be exactly right, but they don't belong in this discussion.

The person i replied to recommended Dr.Web multiple times to tackle the "GENIEO" add-ware.- etc.

So i decided to share the information

capnb00b00 wrote:

The person i replied to recommended Dr.Web multiple times to tackle the "GENIEO" add-ware.- etc.

You replied to thomas_r. who has never, to my knowledge, recommended using anything other than his own web site instructions and more recently his own tool for removing Genieo along with any other Adware. And again, it wan't mentioned here. I can believe he may have recommended Dr. Web Light as an anti-malware solution on previous occasions, but I have not seen anything like that recently. In any case, that would be the appropriate place to post your findings.

I have most assuredly never recommended the use of any anti-virus software to remove Genieo. In fact, I actively recommend against it.

I have been known to recommend the use of Dr. Web Light, from the App Store, as a lightweight manual scanning tool. App Store apps cannot obtain root privileges. You appear to be having a problem with a copy of Dr. Web Light from outside the App Store, and as such, should contact Dr. Web about the problem.

I do not understand how your problem with Dr. Web Light is related to Genieo, so it would be best if you stopped posting this on Genieo-related topics.

Your trying to tell someone not to post in this thread, FAIL, Genieo and Dr.Web are mentioned together on several threads, i says its wise to share the dangers Dr Web poses dont you?

Here is a screen shot of the person who last advised Dr.Web, which is ADD WARE as far as i can see

Genieo, Dr.Web, Avist, all ADD WARE MAIL WARE or possible fakes floating around

Dr. Web is absolutely not adware. If you're going to make such a claim, you'd better be prepared to provide the evidence to back that up. You have not done so.

Dr. Web Light and Genieo are in no way related, so whatever problem you have with Dr. Web Light needs to be addressed elsewhere. All you're doing is confusing folks who are coming here looking for help with Genieo.

im not confusing anyone, your trying to if anyone is.

One might say Dr Web Light has memory leeks but if you look closer to the screen shots and the way it actually interacts with GENIEO it only made things worse by hogging up 8 processes of ram, and you dont think i shoudl mention this since Dr Weblight is been mentioned tons of times, to be blunt even Virus Barrier is a nightmare, it is very hard to remove that app after a trial period, so Genieo is just a pawn in the game, appl has to provide better security but trust is aleady an issue on a international level with computers in general

capnb00b00 wrote:

im not confusing anyone, your trying to if anyone is.

Being argumentative is not going to help anybody and violates Apple's Terms of Use that you agreed to follow, so please drop the attitude.

One might say Dr Web Light has memory leeks but if you look closer to the screen shots and the way it actually interacts with GENIEO it only made things worse by hogging up 8 processes of ram

I think we all agree here that Dr.Web Light is not a recommended solution for removing a Genieo installation.

Since I've been able to somewhat replicate the results you showed and don't have Genieo installed, I would very much like to discuss this, but not here. I've been keeping an eye on your profile in case you have it posted as a new topic where we can get a more appropriate group of users to focus on it (there is even a Dr.Web representative that participates in the forum), but have seen nothing. If you would be willing to do that and post a link to it here, I'd be happy to participate, otherwise I'm done here.