SkyWebProcess

SkyWebProcess is another intrusive application belonging to the AdLoad adware family. Unscrupulous people are spreading these PUPs (Potentially Unwanted Programs) with the goal of earning monetary gains via the delivery of annoying advertisements. The main targets of the AdLoad applications, and by extension SkyWebProcess, are Mac users. Once the adware application has been installed on the device, it will start to monetize its presence there almost immediately.

Affected users will notice a drastic uptick in the advertisements encountered during browsing or sometimes even simply using the Mac. The advertisements could appear as pop-ups, banners, in-text links and more. Another crucial fact about advertisements delivered by unproven sources is that they are likely to be promoting untrustworthy destinations, services or software products. Indeed, infosec researchers warn that the advertisements associated with adware applications could lead to phishing portals, fake giveaways, platforms spreading additional browser hijackers, adware, PUPs or even compromised websites.

At the same time, these intrusive applications could be silently performing other concerning actions in the background of the Mac. Most commonly, PUPs could try to spy on users' browsing activities. The application may be continuously capturing the browsing history, search history, clicked URLs, IP address, geolocation and more. All gathered data is likely to be packaged and transmitted to a server controlled by the PUP's operators. It is possible that the PUP may have established persistence mechanisms on the Mac. In this case, removal could prove to be tricky, unless a professional security solution is used to clean the device.