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A website I manage through another hosting company was infected with "descriptionscripts" malware, which has since been cleaned.

However, I had to browse the site itself during that time and now have concerns over my Mac's security. I was seeing a weird "blue bar" in Google Chrome on various sites, reinstalled and that fixed it, but I'm not sure if that was a generic graphics bug or related to the malware situation.

I also checked the JS that the malware was loading through Hybrid Analysis and the report came back as ambiguous.

I'm considering running Etrecheck but hear mixed reviews, such as the comments on VirusTotal.

For similar reasons, I'm not interested in malwarebytes or cleanmymac.

Ultimately, is there another way I can verify my Mac is clean? And is there hard evidence that Etrecheck is safe to use and easy to uninstall afterward? Thanks in advance. For reference, I'm running the latest OS and Chrome versions.

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  • Make sure you've inspected any Chorme extensions and removed anything you're unfamiliar with; make sure you've also disabled macOS Notifications for Chrome from any websites that seem unfamiliar or suspicious. I've never had any trouble with EtreCheck but I wouldn't consider it a true 'security' tool.
    – da4
    May 26 at 15:21

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Stats. descriptionscripts is a browser hijacker designed to redirect you to websites that can affect your PC. I wouldn’t worry about it doing anything to your Mac.

Looking up this threat in the Microsoft Threat Description Database every result is Windows based (the database isn’t only for Windows platforms). This is a script that will take your browser to other sites to get you to download malware hidden inside of app installers.

That said, you still want to remove it if you happened to install a browser plugin infected with this piece of malware script. The safest and easist way to do this is to simply uninstall your browser (use something like AppCleaner) and reinstall.

It’s important to know that your browser cannot infect your application binaries. Any script that gets installed as a plugin can only redirect you to somewhere else to become infected.

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  • Thank you for the quick reply! Could you please elaborate on what this malware does? I've only found limited info on it being a popup redirect script. Do you have an article source with more details?
    – Rob
    May 26 at 14:35
  • Following up on the expanded answer to say thanks again. The MS link was particularly helpful and interesting to learn from.
    – Rob
    May 26 at 15:24
  • Microsoft actually has a pretty good cybersecurity division that’s now (or soon will be) integrated with AI. McAfee and Norton used to be the gold standard, but they’ve lost their way a long time ago.
    – Allan
    May 26 at 15:30

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