ActiveLink Adware Pushes Ads on Mac

ActiveLink is the name of a piece of Mac adware. The ActiveLink application is a member of the AdLoad family of Mac ad-supported applications.

ActiveLink belongs to a numerous family of clones of the same piece of adware, distributed using a different name each time. The way AdLoad clones are named is simple - put two random words together, getting something like the name "ActiveLink". The icon used is always the same - a looking glass image inside a circle.

What those apps also have in common is their ability to display ads on your Mac. The main issue with this is that a lot of the ads displayed can be sourced from rogue ad networks and may refer to misleading pages, untrustworthy websites, adult content and potentially unwanted apps.

This behavior is clearly not desirable, as is the case with all adware. The only purpose of those ads is to generate revenue for the adware's author.

Luckily, similar apps are easily removed from your Mac, following the standard uninstall procedure, and rarely have any meaningful persistence mechanisms.