Concern on Potential Malware

I am seeing Avast, Avira, Bitdefender, and ClamXAV anti-virus products installed. None of them will find a virus on your Mac, and all of their processes are sucking the life out of your CPU and available RAM — just to potentially produce a false positive notification. Completely useless on your Mac, and I would recommend that you completely uninstall all of them per the vendors' procedures. Just moving something to the Trash won't do it as these are splattered into System places.

Once you achieve the above, you will magically find your Mac more responsive with more available RAM, and with four less applications that are getting tangled up in the built-in security of Mojave, or interfering with your other applications.

I, as well as many others here, actually use Malwarebytes — despite the normal discretionary download sources (e.g. directly from the vendor site).

If you want to see what's in your system download and run Etrecheck. Etrecheck is a diagnostic tool that was developed by one of the most respected users here in the ASC and recommended by Apple Support  to provide a snapshot of the system and help identify the more obvious culprits that can adversely affect a Mac's performance. If there's a OSX.MokesB file in your system Etrecheck will tell you where it's located.

Copy the report

and use the Add Text button to include the report in your reply. How to use the Add Text Feature When Posting Large Amounts of Text, i.e. an Etrecheck Report

Before running Etrecheck assign Full Disk Access to Etrecheck so that it can get additional information from the Console and log files for the report:

Then we can examine the report and see if we can determine the culprit.

Other than Adware, there is no Malware that can attack your Mac. Whatever it found was more than likely just a false positive.

If AV software doesn't tell you it is doing anything, you might be tempted to remove it since it is actually doing nothing useful.

Given that reinstalling Dropbox and Goolag drive caused it to trigger, I imagine it is just a false positive.

You should only ever have to run MalwareBytes once. If you fail to learn your lesson after installing Adware which required you run MBAM, there probably is no hope. Just don't install malware of any kind. It cannot install itself on a Mac.

There was an errant entry in the database a few days ago causing a False Positive report for Mokes.B. This was resolved fairly quickly, so it's a bit surprising your machines managed to pick up that particular database version.

It's safe to say your Macs are still clean, and if they update the database, the reports won't happen any longer.

Barney-15E wrote:

Other than Adware, there is no Malware that can attack your Mac. Whatever it found was more than likely just a false positive.

Actually, that's misleading, at best. Although Adware infections are certainly the most often found, several other types of threats have been discovered so far this year. A summary of ten that we know of are summarized by Sentinal One https://www.sentinelone.com/blog/macos-malware-2019-first-six-months/ and there were six in June alone: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/june-was-a-busy-month-for-in-the-wild-mac-malware-heres-a-rundown/.

No, they all require some sort of user action, mostly through trickery of one sort or another. Many still pose as Flash Player updates which hopefully most users are wise to by now. The most recent has been found using a variety of different web pages, at least one of which offered pirated games (another area users should all be cautioned to avoid) but others have been trusted, encrypted and popular sites that were hacked.

It's true there has not been any malware that meets the technical definition of a Virus since OS X was introduced (able to infect a Mac without user interaction and spreads automatically to other computers). The last that came close was a variant of Flashback in the Spring of 2011 which would infect a Mac that had the Java browser plugin installed. It infected by visiting a web site, but didn't spread to others.

But there have been numerous recent threats from other types of malware (e.g. Trojan horses, ransomware, spyware, scareware) that are not adware.

Certainly can't argue with that, but there really are a lot of them.

But a couple of the most serious threats in the recent past came by way of substituting corrupted versions of popular software (Firefox, Deeper, OnyX & Transmission) on the developer's actual website. The first three are known as CreativeUpdater and deliver a CryptoMiner that monopolizes the users CPU and Internet. The latter was KeRanger Ransomware. All were signed with a valid Apple DeveloperID to easily get past Gatekeeper, but ultimately ended their attack once Apple became aware and revoked them.

What we are seeing this year are some threats designed to completely bypass Gatekeeper and XProtect by various means which result in the user never being warned of the arrival of unsigned or malicious apps and no way for Apple to prevent them from being launched. Apple still has not yet even bothered to update MRT to remove most of these. Some of this malware has been found to check to see if any Anti-Malware software or tools commonly used by malware researchers are being used before attempting to infect and destroy themselves afterward to delay becoming known.

Eventually these methods will be combined and threaten even the smartest user for an extended time.

Not enough info to tell, most indicated you must install them yourself. Any of them manage to function without user intervention.

I guess I can't generate any sympathy for people being stupid on the internet.