One of the favorite ways that we’re seeing hackers try to infect Mac computers is through fake Flash installers. Basically it will create a popup that tells the user that they will need to install the latest version of Adobe’s Flash Player and given that for the most part it has been designed to look like the genuine article, it’s not surprised that some fall for it.
Unfortunately over the years it seems that this trend of trying to infect Mac computers hasn’t gone away because according to Malwarebytes (via 9to5Mac), a new fake Flash Player installer has been discovered. However it seems that this isn’t your run-of-the-mill fake installer because this particular version has been designed to make itself hard to remove from your computer.
According to Malwarebytes, “But something interesting has happened behind the scenes. After removing Advanced Mac Cleaner, and removing all the various components of Crossrider that have been littered around the system, there’s still a problem. Safari’s homepage setting is still locked to a Crossrider-related domain, and cannot be changed.”
The good news is that once you’ve managed to track it down, removing it from profiles is pretty straightforward and easy, but we suppose for the novice it might seem a bit complicated versus allowing an anti-virus software to do all the work for you. That being said, Flash has mostly been phased out of use by most websites, and companies like Apple have disabled Flash by default, so the next time you see the popup when surfing on a website, you should probably ignore it.