'It's blindingly obvious at this point that the Mac App Store is not the safe haven of reputable software that Apple wants it to be,' wrote Malwarebytes' Thomas Reed, one of the world's foremost researchers of Apple system security, in a Malwarebytes company blog posting.
More disturbingly, Apple had apparently known of problems with Adware Doctor for a month, but it stayed in the App Store until the issue was publicly disclosed.
The Apple move follows last week's removal of an best-selling ad-blocking application, Adware Doctor, from the Mac App Store after it was found to be sending user data to a server in China.