Hello. I have an iMac. A couple of nights last week at around 10PM-11PM my iMac screen would come on and I would get the red circle with the white checkmark on the login screen. I couldn’t understand why the computer would come on all the sudden. I started looking around in the console (although I don’t really know what I am looking at) and noticed a few lines around the time I believed the computer to come on.
It said something like “com.avast.proxy : Error connecting to…” and honestly, it freaked me out. I thought, what is AVAST trying to do? After doing some searching, I realized that it was probably more like Avast was blocking (if Avast was actually doing anything). Well, I decided that I was going to nuke my computer and start over. I spent all day Friday breaking my fusion drive, wiping the HDD portion, putting it back together and installing MacOS. Great thing was I got a fresh start and I have a backup of my files so no biggie. The computer is much faster.
So this morning, I got up and looked at the computer and the screen was on. I was hesitant to think much of it because I knew my iPad was leaning on the trackpad and I had bumped the table. There was no red circle and white checkmark indicating a logout issue (or whatever-- I typically can’t login without a restart if that is showing). But as I started thinking, I figured I should probably take a look at the console to see… Just in case.
Once again, I had the “Error connecting to…”
Here they are… (I removed computer name)
May 13 05:38:45 com.avast.proxy[3117]: Error connecting to 198.74.57.216:443: Operation timed out
May 13 05:39:00 com.avast.proxy[3117]: Error connecting to 198.74.57.216:443: Operation timed out
May 13 07:05:30 com.avast.proxy[490]: Error connecting to 198.74.57.216:443: Operation timed out
May 13 07:22:06 com.avast.proxy[490]: Error connecting to 127.0.0.1:80: Connection refused
May 13 07:22:35 com.avast.proxy[490]: Error connecting to 216.93.158.75:443: Operation timed out
May 13 07:22:36 com.avast.proxy[490]: Error connecting to 52.164.206.56:443: Operation timed out
May 13 07:23:06 com.avast.proxy[490]: Error connecting to 17.254.1.5:443: Operation timed out
May 13 07:23:33 com.avast.proxy[490]: Error connecting to 155.199.152.74:443: Operation timed out
May 13 07:25:58 com.avast.proxy[490]: Error connecting to 104.16.109.18:443: connect(): No route to host
May 13 08:58:41 com.avast.proxy[490]: Error connecting to 198.74.57.216:443: Operation timed out
May 13 08:58:50 com.avast.proxy[490]: Error connecting to 198.74.57.216:443: Operation timed out
May 13 08:58:53 com.avast.proxy[490]: Error connecting to 198.74.57.216:443: Operation timed out
May 13 08:59:35 com.avast.proxy[490]: Error connecting to 198.74.57.216:443: Operation timed out
I had noticed these same addresses before. One is for Apple, one for Microsoft, and something else. I wasn’t too concerned about them except for the 198.74.57.216. I googled that and it is jacobbudin.com… What the heck? I looked at the page and this person is a programmer, but why would SOMETHING on my computer be trying to connect to it?
When I was looking at the logs this morning, I noticed that circling the attempted connection was GoogleUpdater or whatever it is call. I recently switched to Safari but I still use Chrome for a few things. I found a resource that gave me a terminal command to reduce how often the Updater checks and that is fine for me.
Final thing to note, as I was getting on here to write this, I decided to open Chrome and just see if the console would log any new “Error connecting to…” … at first nothing showed up, but after Chrome was open for a min or two, those last 4 entries showed up (ones at around 8:58). I closed Chrome and continued writing this post with the console open and no more attempts.
Which leads me to think it is a Chrome extension. Which is awesome because I can disable them all, enable them one a time and see when / if the messages reappear.
Why questions are these… Does anyone else see a “com.avast.proxy[xxx]: Error connecting to 198.74.57.216:443: Operation timed out” on their system?
Does anyone know how to figure out what exactly is trying to connect?
Can I be certain this doesn’t have something to do with an Avast product? (I also toggled the SecureLine VPN around the same 8:58 time)
Does any have any other ideas?
I realize that this might not be best suited for an Avast Forum (now that I have noticed these recent attempts) but this is the General Topics so I hope people will bear with me and provide a little assistance rather than yelling at me.
Thanks!