“It’s blindingly obvious at this point that the Mac App Store is not the safe haven of reputable software that Apple wants it to be,” Reed wrote. The researcher says the incident is a perfect example that even with Apple’s tight controls, the various App Stores are not clear of security issues. It’s unclear if Apple kicked the apps out of the store, or Trend Micro removed them after the research was published. However, as of this article’s publication, none of the Trend Micro apps were available for download. Reed wrote that at the time of publication, the apps were still available in the store. The incident follows a similar discovery, where one of the most profitable apps in the official Mac App Store - Adware Doctor - was side-stepping around Apple’s controls to surreptitiously grab a user’s browser history and send it back a company in China. “We have learned that browser collection functionality was designed in common across a few of our applications and then deployed the same way for both security-oriented as well as the non-security oriented apps such as the ones in discussion,” the blog post read. The company says it has removed the features from the apps, blaming the collection on a re-use of a certain code library. “The potential collection and use of browser history data was explicitly disclosed in the applicable EULAs and data collection disclosures accepted by users for each product at installation,” a Trend Micro blog post reads.

Trend Micro provided an explanation on Monday, saying the collection was a one-time data collection done for security purposes, with data being stored in U.S. Reed found similar behavior on the related Trend Micro apps. Additionally, the app also created a file that “contained detailed information about every application found on the system.” Antivirus, Reed found the app was pulling complete browsing and search history from Chrome, Firefox, Safari and the App store. Yet Read found that the apps were pulling data that they should not have had access to. Battery and Duplicate Finder - are owned and operated by Japan-based Trend Micro.Īpple normally places tight restrictions on what data app developers can collect. Thomas Reed, the lead for Mac and mobile at Malwarebytes, published research last week that discovered a number of MacOS apps were exfiltrating sensitive data to servers controlled by the developer. Cybersecurity giant Trend Micro has apologized after researchers discovered that a number of the company’s consumer-facing apps were collecting users’ browser histories.

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