Since Russia began the war in Ukraine, the cyberattacks have increased dramatically. That made the world and us at MacPaw reevaluate the true meaning of data security. To help our users effectively protect their data, the CleanMyMac team has added a new category of apps to the Uninstaller module — Suspicious.
How does it work?
If any of the applications installed on your Mac are developed by or hosted in Russia or Belarus, CleanMyMac X marks them as suspicious.
To see whether you have any on your computer, follow this instruction:
- Launch CleanMyMac X
- Go to Uninstaller
- Select the Suspicious category in the side menu
- Review the apps in the category and select those you want to uninstall.
Why is it important?
Russia enforced Federal bills No. 374-FZ and 375-FZ in July 2016. They oblige all providers and online services (messengers, emails, social networks, etc.) that have some presence in Russia to store user data on servers in Russia which FSB (Federal Security Service) can easily access upon request without a court order.
As the current regime in Belarus strongly depends on Russia, we have reasons to think that the same fate falls upon the data transfers through Belarusian apps and servers.
We believe that our users should know and understand the risks of running specific programs on their computers. And, as the company you trust, we think that it’s our responsibility to inform you about them and protect your data from being compromised.
Why did we add it?
Since Russian troops have breached Ukraine's borders, we put all of our efforts into securing our employees and operations. We provide humanitarian aid through the MacPaw Fund and help our country in any possible way through volunteering, serving in the Army, spreading truthful information.
Our engineers have developed SpyBuster — a tool that detects apps related to Russia or Belarus and shows how they are behaving. We've decided to add similar functionality if our CleanMyMac X users want to find and uninstall potentially threatening software quickly.
If you have any suggestions on how we can improve CleanMyMac X, feel free to send us your thoughts.
Your CleanMyMac Team 💙💛
