Cannot Kill Bitdefender Process After Uninstalling on macOS High Sierra

high sierralaunchdmacospermission

Recently, I installed Bitdefender Antivirus. I wanted to remove it after the trial period. After uninstalling it via CCleaner, moving all stuff from Librar, I found there is still an agent up and running and I cannot disable. I cannot kill that process even as root:

bdagent – pid 65

sudo su - 
kill -9 65
-sh: kill: (65) - Operation not permitted

Killing it via Activity Monitor doesn't work either.

Output of ps is:

root# ps -ef | grep defender
    0    65     1   0 11:08PM ??         6:49.98 /Library/Bitdefender/Central/Agent/bdagentd
    0   211     1   0 11:08PM ??         0:00.40 /Library/Bitdefender/AVP/antivirus.bundle/BDUpdDaemon
    0   212     1   0 11:08PM ??         0:08.25 /Library/Bitdefender/AVP/antivirus.bundle/BDLDaemon
    0   213     1   0 11:08PM ??         0:00.23 /Library/Bitdefender/AVP/common.bundle/BDCoreIssues
    0   224     1   0 11:08PM ??         0:00.12 /Library/Bitdefender/Central/Agent/bdcredentialsd
  501   513     1   0 11:08PM ??         0:01.13 /Library/Bitdefender/AVP/AntivirusforMac.app/Contents/MacOS/AntivirusforMac

The Bitdefender folder is:

drwxr-xr-x    4 root  wheel   128 Jul  2 19:32 Bitdefender

I cannot remove it, even as root, I cannot chown, nothing.

Is there any way to just remove this?

Best Answer

It is blocked by one or more of the extensions it installs: FileProtect.kext, SelfProtect.kext, TMProtection.kext

You should always use Bitdefender's uninstaller at /Applications/Bitdefender/BitdefenderUninstaller and not these other apps you mentioned. Follow the instructions at https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/answer/1784/

If that doesn't work, that page links to another page that covers the manual removal process. https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/answer/1446/

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