Tool to sort Activity Monitor: legit or suspicious I was wondering whether there was a tool similar to Hijackthis on Windows for Mac. I know Mac doesn't have a registry, but malware could similarly run as a background process, service or helper tool. Since permissions on the Mac have become stricter over the years, admin passwords need to be provided today to install virtually any app. So, virtually all apps have admin privileges for some things during the install process.
I'm not sure how it looks for everyone else, but I have over 500 processes running most of the time in Activity Monitor. For most of them, I do not understand what they do or if they are really necessary. I worry on the one hand that they might slow my system down. In the worst case, I worry that I may have malicious software running in the background (e.g., Zoom's hidden web server).
Hence, I was wondering whether there was a software similar to Hijackthis that scans processes and gives some info about them, possibly with an assessment of their quality, risk. What I am looking to gain is more control over what is running on my Mac, like Hijackthis provides on Windows.
At https://objective-see.com/products.html there are (free) tools available to see security related process information (persistent processes, process hierarchy etc.)
There is a suite of security features (like GateKeeper), including malware removal tools (xProtect and – appropriately named – MRT) built into macOS.
These are updated silently and regularly in the background independent of &quot;regular&quot; macOS updates.
If you want to see more information/the current status of all these built-in tools, have a  look at the applications available at: https://eclecticlight.co/downloads/.