Lots of Mac users have started receiving pop-up messages stating something like this:
“Apple wants to make changes. Type your password to allow this.“
Questions about this pop-up are currently being asked in most all the popular Mac support forums online, and as you can imagine these folks are quite concerned that something untoward is happening with their Macs.
Well, their concern is indeed warranted because the “Apple wants to make changes…” pop-up is likely being caused by malware.
The best clue that malware is to blame is the use of the word “Apple”.
While MacOS will often pop-up a message like “Finder wants to make changes.” or something similar when the user is trying to perform various actions, I’ve never seen one of these messages use the word “Apple” in the message.
And that makes sense because Apple is the company that makes the Mac line of computers. Apple is not the operating system that runs on them, so “Apple” should never want to make a change to your system. It’s the operating system that does that.
Therefore, if you receive a message that states “Apple want to make changes” you can safely assume that it’s probably malware that causing the pop-up to appear.
Luckily, there’s an easy way to get rid of the malware that’s causing these messages to appear on Macs: Simply run a scan with Malwarebytes for Mac.
Malwarebytes for Mac has been successful at removing the malware that’s causing these messages to appear in every case that I’m aware of. Give it a try if this ever happens to your Mac. And if you don’t mind, please let me know how it goes. I would really appreciate your feedback.
Disclaimer: I used the word “probably” in the title of this post because there’s always a chance that a legitimate pop-up could use the word “Apple” in the permission dialog.
But that being said, I’ve never seen one of these messages that was legitimate use that word. If you have, please tell us about it in the “Comments” section below.
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