Hot on the heels of this app being caught stealing your browser history come another report via the Malwarebytes forum of the same behavior being done by a Mac Apps by “Trend Micro Inc.” called Dr. Unarchiver, Dr. Cleaner and others by the same company. Now this is the same Trend Micro that is best known for putting out antivirus apps for consumer and corporate uses. Which makes this a big bloody deal for reasons that I will get to in a second.
Now after the initial report of this, another report soon surfaced. Other researchers confirmed this as well. The key is that you have to give the app in question permission for it to access your home directory as that’s required for the app to snatch your browser history. That’s because the design of macOS doesn’t allow the app access to that directly unless you explicitly give it permission. So if you see an app try and ask you for permission to do so, don’t.
Now it’s a safe bet that now that this is public, Apple will ban these apps just like they banned the other apps that I reported on a couple of days ago. But here’s the big question that people should be asking. Actually two of them. The first is, is Apple asleep at the switch here when it comes to having stuff like this slip past the goalposts?
Second, this “Trend Micro Inc.” is the same one that puts out consumer and commercial anti virus apps, you have to wonder how widespread their theft of private info from computers is? If I were a customer of there’s I’d be asking that question while yanking their stuff off my computers. And I would expect a detailed and robust answer from them along with a plan to address this so that private info is not at risk. EVER.
UPDATE: These apps have been removed from the App Store