Last night someone (who will remain nameless) watched The Interview on my Macbook Pro. That’s cool. But then I discovered that they watched it for free. I got them to send me the link and I visited the website on my windows machine, and the site playing the movie asked me to install some sort of video player.
Oiy.
I am pretty sure the site is some sort of scam to get you to install something nasty, but I don’t know. The link is below. On my windows machine, the movie played even without installing anything, so I don’t know what to think. If it were a trojan/malware site would they really go to the trouble of presenting the movie?
If this were on my PC, I would know what to do. Run scans, look in ARP and see if any programs were added last night, Google, etc. On the Mac, I have no idea. If I Google, I get a lot of hits that assure me there are no virus for Macs, but (on at least one of those sites) it’s a nine page article, so it feels a little like a they-protesteth-too-much kind of thing.
I did a little googling about this and someone suggested installing Adobe’s Flash player from the Adobe site and going back to the movie site to see if I still get prompted to install the video player. I actually did that (on my Windows machine), even though the movie was playing without the required player. When I refreshed the page, it just asked me to install a java plug-in.
As my father used to say, “Oiy.”
Anyhow. I am back on my Macbook pro and I don’t see any new applications in my apps folder, but I really have no idea what I’m looking for.
I’d check the Applications and /usr/bin folders to see if anything got installed. But based on what you’re saying I doubt there’s a problem. If your Mac is up to date then most loopholes are already closed.
I WOULD uninstall flash player and Java if you don’t absolutely need them however. Those are huge virus / Trojan vectors that need constant updating and aren’t maintained by apple.
Thank you Diego! Nothing appears to be new is in Applications or the /usr/bin folder.
Wow, it’s not easy to figure out how to uninstall flash/java. For Flash, for example, Adobe has a page with some instruction, and it involves downloading another program to uninstall the player, but then you have to match the program you need to download to the version of OS X you’re running, and they don’t seem to have one for Yosemite yet. I’ll keep poking around.
I am pleased that my Macbook is teenager proof. On my windows machine, this would have taken anywhere from a few minutes to an hour. On the Mac, it’s already taken care of. :)
Unstalling flash should be relatively easy. Use the Adobe un installers or you can do manually by checking /library/Internet plugins and ~/library/Internet plugins. You’ll also want to remove the preference pane. Think those are in the system and user versions of library/prefpanes or similar.
Java is more complicated. Think the apple version may install system frameworks and we aren’t supposed to manually touch the /system path. Might want to google that one and be specific about apple vs sun distribution.
In general it seems like your mbp is fine and reasonably teenager proof for the moment :-)
Run whatever the most recent Adobe Flash uninstaller is, it works fine on Yosemite. Then, whenever you hit the rare site that uses Flash, fire up Chrome. It has Flash support built in and Google is a lot more diligent about keeping their implementation secure than Adobe is. Plus Chrome auto-updates every time you launch it, so it’ll take care of that for you.
