…in a conversation last month with Ashton. I conflated it with the “Macdefender” and “Mackeeper” scamwares, and urged him to deploy garlic and a cross. I subsequently realized my mistake. I’ve never used malwarebytes myself, but it appears to have a spotless reputation.

I brought Ashton his “burner” Mac yesterday, but this was unable to connect to the unsecured wireless network, even though his older iMac, six inches away, had no problem doing so. I argued—apparently successfully—that, once I had secured all the documents from the elder unit onto external media, he had little/nothing at risk in going online with this machine. I believe that he could cable up the new iMac with as much confidence, but have not yet closed the deal. Anyway, I’m glad to welcome our man AB back to these precincts, and venture to hope that at some point we may collectively set his mind at ease.

I’ll repeat that although I am by no means an IT security maven, I pay enough attention to Mac news that were some kind of vicious malware with the powers he attributes to it out there in the wild, I would at least have heard rumors of this. I demonstrated, I believe, that some of the symptoms AB attributed to external interference were in fact obscure attributes of the Mac GUI protocols. I have not the technical chops to explain away the enigmas of the Console, but as Peter has observed, these are not there for the lay user, and lend themselves to mystification and misinterpretation on the part of the uninitiate.

cordially,