MacOS – the AppArt process and why does it want to connect to application-stats.com

macosNetwork

I use Little Snitch (https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html) to monitor background network traffic. When an application tries to connect to the internet for the first time, Little Snitch pops up a dialog box that asks me whether I want to allow the connection. Most of the time it's pretty obvious what the process is, and I either Allow or Deny network access. But I'm stumped by this process:

Little Snitch blocking a connection by the AppArt process to application-stats.com

What is AppArt? What is application-stats.com? And why does the former want to connect to the latter?

Best Answer

Following @tubedogg's comment above, I think I've fixed this:

  • http://www.malwareurl.com/listing.php?domain=application-stats.com identifies the domain as Malware
  • Double-clicking the "AppStats" process in Activity Monitor and then clicking the "Open Files and Ports" tab reveals that something is running from /Users/jim/Library/Application Support/Spigot/AppStats
  • Searching "Spigot" then takes us here, which gives removal instructions: http://www.thesafemac.com/arg-spigot/
  • I didn't find any weird browser extensions in Firefox, Safari, or Chrome (the directory in Application Support included a file with a name that referenced a .xpi file, so I'm guessing the problem may have been something to do with an old Firefox extension) but I did remove the following directories and files: ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.applicationstats.AppStats.plist, ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.appart.AppArt.plist, ~/Library/Application Support/Spigot/
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