How to remove annoying adware installed in my MacBook?

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Level 1

8 points

How to remove annoying adware installed in my MacBook?

Ever since my cousin downloaded a movie subtitle on my MacBook a few weeks ago, my laptop has been having many issues.

She seems to have accidentally installed an adware when she downloaded the subtitles.

From what she told me, apparently she downloaded a wrong file when she was trying to download the subtitles, and installed MacKeeper on my laptop, which we uninstalled ASAP.

However, ever since that has happened, weird problems have come up, which led me to think that I may have an adware on my computer.

Here are the main issues that I have since then (I am using Safari ver 9.1.2):

-overheats easily when I have particular pages open (such as the foreign equivalent of reddit, buzzfeed). But when I check the Activity Monitor when this happens, I don’t see anything mysterious hogging my CPU.

-most webpages load normally, but some contents for some pages have stopped showing up

-after accessing a link a few times, Safari fails loading that page with the message “safari can’t connect to the server”. For most webpages this doesnt happen, but it persistently happens for particular pages.

-weird ads that never seem to fully load pop up on almost every websites I visit. It usually looks like blue, yellow and red spirals and is usually presented by “DealTop” (pls refer to attached pic)

I tried looking my problem up on the Internet, but could find very little information and these problems persisted even after I followed what little advice I found.

Advice that I followed consisted of things like deleting mysterious data from folders like LaunchAgents.

In addition to the picture of the ads that keep popping up, I have also attached what my LaunchAgents folder currently look like, just in case it might help.

Interestingly, this problem disappeared after I followed those advices:

-whenever I click on anywhere on the page (ANY LINK, including my school website) that I newly loaded, a new ad tab opens

I have a MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan 10.11.6.

I’ve had this laptop since August 2013.

All software is up to date, I don’t have any anti-virus softwares installed.

Any help would be appreciated, thank you! 😕

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6)

Posted on Aug 8, 2016 12:06 AM

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Answer 1

dominic23

Level 10

84,018 points

Aug 8, 2016 2:48 AM in response to coldpine777

How to remove adware?

You will have t do this after starting up in Safe Mode to prevent adware

from interfering with the removal of adware .

1. Shut down the computer.

Press the power button. Immediately after you hear the startup sound,

press and hold the Shift key.

The Shift key should be pressed as soon as possible after startup,

but not before the startup sound.

Release the Shift key when you see the Apple logo on the screen.

Startup will take longer than usual.

Screen flickering is normal in Safe Mode.

Login to your account. Launch Safari.

Enter this address https://www.malwarebytes.org/antimalware/mac/

in the Safari address bar.

Download, Install , open, and run it by clicking “Scan” button to remove adware, if present.

Once done, quit MalwareBytes.

2. Safari > Preferences > Extensions

Turn all extensions off.

3. Safari > Preferences > Search > Search Engine :

Select your preferred search engine.

4. Safari > Preferences > General > Homepage:

Set your Homepage.

5. Restart normally from  menu in the menu bar.

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