Use Pacifist to examine potential malware installers

Apr 12, '06 06:16:00AM

Contributed by: pendragon

Since Pacifist allows you to see exactly what a package will install and where, you can also examine the install scripts if you click on the Resources tab. So if a program were going to stick something unsavory in /Library -> StartupItems or /System -> Library -> Extensions, you would find out about it before the installation.

So if you've downloaded a package and you'd like to know what it's going to do before it does it, take a look at it with Pacifist first. But now I wonder if someone could write a script or such, so that Pacifist would automatically launch every time a package were double clicked. Waddya think?

[robg adds: Somewhat obviously, this only works for programs that use the package installer.]

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