Listen, the
Living With articles have become a staple of
MacNN, and in every single case they are articles about what we've learned using hardware and software over an extended period, instead of solely in the initial testing. In some cases, they are apps or products that we loved, and that instantly became part of our working life, and sometimes we didn't really appreciate them until many months down the line, when they've somehow become indispensable. This is the first and hopefully last
Living With where it isn't our choice: we have been trying to get rid of Kaspersky Internet Security from the day we finished testing it.
You will never read any article about malware on Macs that doesn't at least cover itself by saying yes, well, it's nowhere near as bad as it is on Windows, but actually OS X is not completely, completely safe. We said that in
our January 2015 review, and we said it for all the same reasons as anyone else: it is not possible to be completely free of risk from problems. You're more likely to be conned into clicking a rogue download button or be plagued with adware than you are to pick up a virus, since there aren't any viruses for the Mac -- and that's a great deal to do with how secure Macs are. It's also to do with how we get more problems from pop-up ads, which Kaspersky isn't designed for.
Kaspersky is for a situation where you have some software you don't want, can't uninstall, which slows your machine down which prevents you working, and which makes your blood reach boiling point faster than a politicians' speech. What Kaspersky Internet Security is meant to do is scan anything that comes in to your Mac via, say, email, or to check out any file you drag onto the app. It's also got a quite clever system for preventing anyone installing a keyboard logger on your Mac, and so being able to record and use every keystroke you make.
That partly works by presenting you with an onscreen virtual keyboard whenever you have to enter a password or other sensitive information. The point is that the keyboard is on screen, and you are clicking on it instead of pressing any actual keys. So no keyboard logger, in the remote possibility that you have one, can get your credit card number. Since the virtual keyboard pops up in your way wherever that field happens to be, it's also impossible for any bad person to know that clicking at this point means the number one, and here means five, and so on.
As we say, it's a clever idea, except you would expect that something monitoring everything your Mac does would be able to scan for the presence of actual keyboard loggers, or to detect outgoing transmissions from one. You'd like it to be less intrusive, and you'd like it to be a less ugly keyboard -- but as pointless irritations go, it's clever. Except this was also our first clue that we had not uninstalled Kaspersky Internet Security the way we thought we had.
The moment we finished testing it, we ran the provided Kaspersky Uninstaller, and all's fine: except it isn't. The Kaspersky Uninstaller does not uninstall Kaspersky. Every now and again, we would find that on-screen keyboard popping back up. It wasn't every day, and it seemed to be mostly whenever we switched to a different browser and back again, but it kept happening. If you really, really dig into the Kaspersky website, then you find two things: firstly, a huge amount of what's called "the fear-close:" text that might as well be saying "well, if you really want to leave Western Civilization and your unborn children to perish because you couldn't be bothered to pay the annual subscription, click here."
The second thing you find is that there is another Kaspersky Uninstaller. A second uninstaller. We did speak with Kaspersky at various times during this, and they kept telling us that we had a unique problem, but they must have a few unique problems: for they have a second uninstaller on their website. They didn't make that for us, we're not the FBI, so there are other people with other problems that merely uninstalling an app won't fix. We would say that it's unacceptable to have to have two different software uninstallers from the same developer designed to uninstall the one same application, except that part of us wants to reserve that word for the fact that you have to hunt for this second uninstaller.
Kaspersky support calls this second uninstaller a "removal tool," and told us that it "is used mainly for when you need to be sure that all instances of Kaspersky are removed from a particular machine (for example, when you want to install a different AV [anti-virus] solution on your computer). The uninstaller should be used as normal, and you only really need to use the removal tool when you have to be sure that Kaspersky is totally removed from a device."
They would have us also tell you that they said "something went wrong on your machine, as this is the first time we've heard of this issue." There will always be machines that go wrong, and combinations of software that developers can't predict, and we would go to the developers, we did go to the developers, before writing about it. However, that second uninstaller is a smoking gun: give us one reason, any reason at all, why you would ever want to uninstall software, but not uninstall it.
Much as we don't like this, though, we do have to acknowledge that at least there is this second uninstaller, this removal tool, and that you can find it online. One small problem, though: it doesn't work either.
It looked like it did, though so did the first one, and in this case it was several months before we had another problem -- but we had another problem. We were doing a backup of our Macs, and ChronoSync was stopped in its tracks by what Kaspersky Internet Security had still not uninstalled. Kaspersky left a file called ".0om_kaspersky_iswift.journal" on our Macs. The Kaspersky company has confirmed that it is theirs, but so far has not been able to explain how it remained undetected until this backup utility was unable to copy it.
You may not know this, but there are invisible files on your Mac: important files that the system needs, and that in theory you never need to know are there. Files that are important enough that they're made invisible, so that they can't be seen in the Finder, can't be found by a regular search, and therefore can't be accidentally deleted. However, when you do a search for a file, you can specify that it shows these invisible ones -- and we'd done that. We'd already searched for visible and invisible files with the name "kaspersky" anywhere in them. We'd done that after the first uninstall failed, and before we learned of the second one. We didn't find this last file: it is a genuinely invisible, invisible file.
Now, that does make us wonder if there really is something else wrong with our Mac, and we can't blame Kaspersky for some unknown error on our particular machine. We can blame them for leaving files behind after using an uninstaller, though, and we can blame them for leaving files behind after a second uninstaller. Unfortunately, we can also blame them for their onscreen keyboard popping up again. It's extremely rare now: we've waited a couple more months to see what happens next, and while we've again seen that wretched keyboard, it's been a blue moon kind of thing.
Yes, that's the same image of the keyboard. You've just seen it twice: we've ground down teeth over that keyboard. Still, it's not appeared for a while: maybe we could wait a little longer, it's only been 13 months since its first uninstaller first failed to uninstall it. Only, this week the Kaspersky company released a new version of Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac, and we're not reviewing it: we're not going near it. You're reading the closest thing to a review we will give that app. Maybe it's fixed all these issues, maybe we could be sure that if there's a problem, that it's in this new version, and not leftover detritus from last year's software that we've only uninstalled twice. We'll never know: we will never install any software from Kaspersky again.
Software is intensely personal, and so are our Macs: you can feel how angry this app has made us. Kaspersky is a long-standing company that would doubtlessly argue we need protection from software we don't want, can't uninstall, which slows our machines down and which prevents us working. We couldn't agree more.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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