Disable McAffee Endpoint Protection OSX

disable mcafee endpoint protection.md

method 1

sudo /usr/local/McAfee/AntiMalware/VSControl stopoas

alternatively

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.mcafee.ssm.antimalware.plist OAS_Enable -bool False
sudo /usr/local/McAfee/AntiMalware/VSControl stop
sudo /usr/local/McAfee/AntiMalware/VSControl reload

Or completely uninstall:

sudo -s
cd /usr/local/McAfee/
./uninstall EPM

McAfee on our team's company managed Macbook laptops suddenly start using > 100% RAM on our machines, causing swapping, applications to freeze and eventually complete machine lockup. It's been a huge productivity killer.

Ran everything except the last uninstall command, lest this is not allowed, but the McAfee processes keep respawning! It's like the anti-virus software is acting like a virus in and of itself?! Then it's only a matter of time until they eat up all the machine's resources again.

It appears that there are also:

• LaunchDaemons
• LaunchAgents
• Kernel extensions (Mac's version of kernel modules)

The first thing restarted seems to be a kernel module called com.McAfee.FMPSysCore.

Running these commands frequently in a loop shows that it's the first thing that comes back:

sudo ps auxww | grep -i 'VShieldScanner\|VShieldScanManager\|masvc\|McAfee' | grep -v grep   | awk '{ print $2 }'  | sudo xargs kill -9     ;   kextstat  | grep -i mcafee | awk '{ print $6 }'  | sudo xargs -n1 -I{} kextunload -verbose 2 -bundle-id '{}'

I still haven't found a way to 100% disable them, and don't want to resort to full uninstall yet... still waiting on helpdesk ticket to see what they say.

Thank you very much!
McAfee Endpoint Security for Mac Threat Protection v10.2.3 on macOS 10.14.6 drove my startup time to a near standstill. Disabling Threat Protection has made startup snappy once again.

The 'alternatively' commands above did the trick.

Thank you again!
Andrew.

Thank U
Thank U
Thank U!

My insanity has been restored!

thank you very useful

Thanks!

Thanks!!!

One more thing that can be done is to turn off the KeepAlive in the plist of all mcafee files in /Library/LaunchDaemons. Once you restart you machine then you can just kill all the processes. This is useful because you can use a script on startup to disable them and if you Corporate IT notices you just restart without running the script and the system is back to normal running this piece of 5!-!!t software.

Few more tricks. I had to run each of them twice.

To disable Firewall

sudo /usr/local/McAfee/StatefulFirewall/bin/StatefullFirewallControl stop

To disable WebProtection

sudo /usr/local/McAfee/WebProtection/bin/WPControl stop

Is there a way to turn these back on? Previously a restart would enable everything again, but no longer with OS Sonoma.