One of the things that file does is allow the developer to identify what file types the app is capable of opening, using an array of data given the key “CFBundleDocumentTypes” that defines all the file types. Inside all Mac apps, there is a file called ist, which defines a number of characteristics of the app. This piqued my curiosity, so I poked a little deeper, and found something very interesting. It simply seemed to be sitting there, doing nothing. There wasn’t a new launch agent or daemon designed to load it. Even more intriguing, this app didn’t have any apparent mechanism for being launched.

Once I had installed it and was poking around to see whether it had installed anything new – perhaps a shiny new piece of adware, for example – I discovered an odd app, named Mac File Opener, tucked away where the average user would never see it. It looked like an ordinary Advanced Mac Cleaner installer… which is not to say it looked like anything I’d want on my computer, but still, I was determined to do the wrong thing, so I clicked right through and installed it. This resulted in an installer file named “amc_rb_mfm1.pkg” being downloaded, which I proceeded to open. But, of course, I was determined not to be, so I clicked the green button to install the “security update.” If I were being cautious, I would have closed this page immediately, rather than doing anything it said.

It began here, on a scam page hosted on the official Advanced Mac Cleaner website: And it is that strange and malicious app that will be our focus today. Because within this rabbit-hole lay one special nugget of… well, not gold.

Although I could go on at length about these products behaviors and why we detect them as PUPs, that is beside the point. PCVARK is responsible for gems like Advanced Mac Cleaner, Mac Adware Cleaner, et al.

I began to look into it, and very quickly found myself in a deep rabbit-hole of Mac crapware, all from a major developer of Mac PUPs (potentially unwanted programs), PCVARK. Recently, Jérôme Segura forwarded me a link to a fake virus scam page that seemed to be Mac-related.

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