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I have reason to suspect that somebody may have had unauthorized access to my computer. I've just reset my copy of OS X from the recovery partition. Afterwards, I was prompted twice to update my OS via the App Store. One of these I may have selected through a notification; the second I selected through the App Store. I'm now on 10.13.6.

Is there a way now to make sure both of these updates were legitimately provided by Apple?

Relatedly, if somebody wanted to install malware of some kind into the recovery partition of my MacBook, is there any way either to scan and remove that or to replace that portion of the hard drive with a legitimate version of the partition?

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  • Not a direct duplicate but if you see this answer and you still have the dmg files from the updates you can validate if they're from Apple.
    – fsb
    Sep 30, 2018 at 13:46
  • Pretty sure Apple already verifies that updates are digitally signed... assuming your OS hasn’t been tampered with, I’d think updating would be safe. And if your OS is already being tampered with (at root level), all bets are off, since a hacker could tamper with any check you performed. I would just install the updates.
    – Wowfunhappy
    Sep 30, 2018 at 19:27

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On other software updates (and for not having any doubt about the legit of them) sudo through terminal.

To install all available software updates, instead use the command sudo softwareupdate -i -a. The -a switch simply instructs the command to install all updates. Again, you’ll need to enter your admin password when prompted.

There’s no traditional progress bar, but you will see updated text entries in the Terminal window as each step is completed, letting you know both when certain updates have been downloaded and when the entire installation process is complete.

If you installed software updates that require a reboot, you’ll see a final message instructing you to restart your Mac. You can do this via the normal macOS interface, but since we’re already using UNIX commands in Terminal, you can also type sudo shutdown -r now, which instructs shutdown command to restart the Mac (“-r”) immediately (“now”).

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