What you need to know
- Ukrainian developer MacPaw has unveiled a new anti-spyware tool for macOS.
- SpyBuster is designed to stop apps and websites that communicate with servers in Russia and Belarus.
- It has been designed to help combat cyberattacks and the spread of misinformation.
Ukrainian developer MacPaw has today announced that it has developed a new anti-spyware tool for macOS called SpyBuster.
The company says it has developed a tool that analyses where apps on macOS are taking your data, first spawned from an idea to help Ukrainians protect their online data and information from Russian law enforcement agencies. The group now says that it has decided that "all macOS users worldwide" could use the tool, which filters all of your apps and visited websites so you can see and block any that are connected to Russia or Belarus.
The app uses Static Analysis to show if an app is somehow related to Russia, and Dynamic Analysis to show how these apps and websites are behaving, for example, if they are sending messages to servers or writing files:
SpyBuster scans these connections in real-time and displays their history (logs) that show whether the connection was secure. You can see only the potentially threatening connections by clicking the Compromised Only button and then adding them to Deny List, so they no longer work.
The app then gives users to disable the connection. The new app requires macOS 10.15 or better and is completely free to download.
"As a Tech R&D team before the war, we did a lot of research. So I began to check which of them could contribute to the country's informational security," said Sergii Kryvoblotskyi," head of MacPaw's Tech R&D. "One of these researches was about the technical implementation of network filtering on macOS. I've realized it could be well-applied to protecting computers from potentially dangerous apps and adapted to help users in our new reality."
MacPaw is also offering users the chance to donate to humanitarian causes helping on the ground in Ukraine through its MacPaw development fund.
