Remove NightOwl From Your Mac ASAP

While there is a setting in macOS to automatically switch between light and dark mode, it’s not great, which is why many Mac users turn to NightOwl. The app allows you to switch between dark and light modes based on various triggers, keep certain apps in light mode at all times, and switch between modes using hotkeys.

While NightOwl is good at what it does, the main downside is that the application now appears to be malware that has a habit of adding people’s computers to a botnet without explicit consent. It goes without saying that you should remove it right now. In any case, a lot of NightOwl’s features are built into macOS these days, so you won’t miss out on much if you get rid of them.

What happened to the Night Owl?

Web developer Taylor Robinson noticed that NightOwl was being sold to a new company, TPE.FYI LLC. While this isn’t necessarily alarming in itself, Robinson found that the new owners have changed NightOwl’s terms of service so that the app now automatically adds your computer to a “market research” botnet.

If you have a newer version of NightOwl installed, you will notice that the application starts a launch agent on your Mac, presumably to automatically update. Robinson notes that this launch agent does a lot more than just check for updates and report crashes. You can view the blog post for technical details on how the app adds you to the botnet.

Being part of a botnet allows attackers to spy on your computer and use it for things like DDOS attacks. It’s unclear if the NightOwl botnet is doing just that: Robinson notes that it could be to collect data for some kind of concert ticketing platform. However , the app’s terms and conditions make it clear that it can spy on you and send this data to various third parties:

The NightOwl app allows users to share internet traffic by changing their device’s network settings to act as a gateway for internet traffic. In addition, the User’s device acts as a gateway for NightOwl Application Clients, including companies specializing in web and market research, search engine optimization, brand protection, content delivery, cyber security, etc.

Whatever the purpose of this data collection, you should probably consider it a flagrant violation of your privacy.

How to remove NightOwl from your Mac

If you have NightOwl installed, you don’t have to just drag it to the Trash to delete it. Instead, Robinson shared a foolproof way to completely remove it from your Mac. This can be a little intimidating for some people because it involves running terminal commands , but you just need to copy and paste the following commands into a new terminal window:

sudo killall NightOwllaunchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/NightOwlUpdater.plistsudo killall AutoUpdatesudo rm -rf /Applications/NightOwl.app/~/Library/LaunchAgents/NightOwlUpdater.plissudo zsh -c “rm /Users/*/Library/LaunchAgents/NightOwlUpdater.plist

Once you do that, you will be rid of this app (and malware threat) forever. Dan Moren notes in his post on the Six Colors blog that older versions of NightOwl do not contain the problematic files, so it looks like the botnet code has been added to later versions of the app. But it’s still better to delete the app permanently.