Uninstall NightOwl From Your Mac ASAP
Reading Time: 2 minutesNightOwl is another case of an app turning malicious after it was bought.
While macOS has a setting to automatically switch between light and dark mode, it isn’t great, so many Mac users turn to NightOwl. The app lets you toggle dark and light mode based on a variety of triggers, keep certain apps in light mode all the time, and switch between modes using hotkeys.
While NightOwl is good at what it does, the major downside is that the app is apparently malware now, making a habit of adding people’s computers to a botnet without explicit consent. It should go without saying that you should uninstall it right away. Many of NightOwl’s features are built into macOS these days anyway, so you’re not missing out on much if you get rid of it.
What happened with NightOwl?
Web developer Taylor Robinson noticed NightOwl had been sold to a new company, ‘TPE.FYI LLC.’ While that by itself isn’t necessarily alarming, Robinson discovered the new owners changed NightOwl’s terms of service: Now, the app automatically adds your computer to a botnet for ‘market research.’
If you have a newer version of NightOwl installed, you will notice that the app runs a launch agent on your Mac, seemingly to automatically update it. Robinson notes this launch agent is doing a lot more than just checking for updates and reporting crashes. You can check out the blog post to see the technical details of how the app adds you to a botnet.
Being a part of a botnet allows malicious parties to spy on your computer and use it for things like DDOS attacks. It’s not clear whether the NightOwl botnet does exactly this: Robinson notes that this could be for gathering data for some kind of a concert ticketing platform. The app’s terms and conditions make it clear that it can spy on you, though, and send that data to a variety of third-parties:
NightOwl app enables Users to share internet traffic by modifying their device’s network settings to be used as a gateway for internet traffic. Additionally, the User’s device acts as a gateway for NightOwl app’s Clients, including companies that specialize in web and market research, SEO, brand protection, content delivery, cybersecurity, etc.
No matter what the purpose of that data collection is, you should probably consider it a flagrant violation of your privacy.
How to uninstall NightOwl from your Mac
If you have NightOwl installed, you shouldn’t just drag it to Trash to remove it. Instead, Robinson shared a foolproof way to totally uninstall it from your Mac. This may be a bit intimidating for some people because it involves running Terminal commands, but you just have to copy and paste the following commands into a new Terminal window:
sudo killall NightOwllaunchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/NightOwlUpdater.plistsudo killall AutoUpdatesudo rm -rf /Applications/NightOwl.app/~/Library/LaunchAgents/NightOwlUpdater.plissudo zsh -c 'rm /Users/*/Library/LaunchAgents/NightOwlUpdater.plist
Once you’ve done that, you’ll be rid of this app (and the malware threat) for good. Dan Moren, in a post on the Six Colors blog, notes that older versions of NightOwl don’t appear to have the offending files, so it appears the botnet code was added to more recent versions of the app. But it’s still a good idea to delete the app for good.
Reference: https://lifehacker.com/uninstall-nightowl-from-your-mac-asap-1850721644
Ref: lifehacker
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