Removal of McAfee from OSX

Note: This was written in 2015, it may be out of date now.

There are a lot of commands here which I use sudo if you don't know what you're doing with sudo, especially where I rm you can severely screw up your system.

There are many reasons which you would want to remove a piece of software such as McAfee, such as not wanting it to hammer your CPU during work hours which seems like primetime for a virus scan.

I intend this to be a living document, I have included suggestions from peoples' replies.

Uninstall

You can attempt to uninstall, but it may not work randomly. There's an uninstaller you can download, it never worked properly for me.

Per @ryenus try:

/Library/McAfee/agent/scripts/uninstall.sh
/usr/local/McAfee/fmp/bin/unInstallFMP

Per @mirnujAtom try:

sudo /usr/local/McAfee/uninstall EPM

Per @javaswinger try any or all of the following:

All Modules

sudo /usr/local/McAfee/uninstall EPM

Threat Prevention Module

sudo /usr/local/McAfee/uninstall ThreatPrevention

Firewall Module

sudo /usr/local/McAfee/uninstall Firewall

Web Control Module

sudo /usr/local/McAfee/uninstall WebControl

`launchd` Services

There are both local and root level launchd services. Thanks @rynosoft for finding some more which I missed.

Local User Level

launchctl stop com.mcafee.menulet
launchctl stop com.mcafee.reporter

launchctl remove com.mcafee.menulet
launchctl remove com.mcafee.reporter

Root Level

sudo su -

launchctl stop com.mcafee.virusscan.fmpd
launchctl stop com.mcafee.ssm.ScanManager
launchctl stop com.mcafee.virusscan.ssm.ScanFactory
launchctl stop com.mcafee.ssm.Eupdate
launchctl stop com.mcafee.agent.macompat
launchctl stop com.mcafee.agent.ma
launchctl stop com.mcafee.agent.macmn

launchctl remove com.mcafee.virusscan.fmpd
launchctl remove com.mcafee.ssm.ScanManager
launchctl remove com.mcafee.virusscan.ssm.ScanFactory
launchctl remove com.mcafee.ssm.Eupdate
launchctl remove com.mcafee.agent.macompat
launchctl remove com.mcafee.agent.ma
launchctl remove com.mcafee.agent.macmn

Finding More Services

As this document may be out of date by the time you find it, try these to find more mcafee garbage.

launchctl list | grep mcafee
sudo launchctl list | grep mcafee

You can use similar steps as above to stop and remove them.

Files

Aside from the services, there will be a shit-ton of files left on the file system.

You can search and destroy mcafee stuff with this:

find / -name "com.mcafee*" -exec rm {} \; -print

You may not have access to all of those files, you can sudo find... to elevate your privileges.

Per @jlevy if you are using TimeMachine, you'll want to ignore those back-ups.

sudo find / -name "*MobileBackup*" -prune -or -name "com.mcafee*" -print > /tmp/to-delete

You can cat /tmp/to-delete to show what you should delete.

Per @javaswinger consider finding just *mcafee* instead of com.mcafee* for a more complete list.

sudo find / -type f -name '*mcafee*' -print

Fix McAfee Runaway Process

Per @TimLethbridge you can fix mcafee's runaway process by modifying some permissions.

cd /usr/local
sudo chown -R root McAfee
sudo reboot

Block Corp Policies

@alexellis asked how to block corp policies from re-installing McAfee.

This is outside of the scope of this document. If you are on a corporate network screwing around with policies may result in a strong lecture or even cost you your job, depending on your field.

I have some theories involving setting up non-domain level users on the system, but I don't have a lab to do the testing and I primarily use Linux now, so I don't care enough try it.

Conculsion

Fuck McAfee.

chrishuan9/remove_mcafee.md