Basics4Mac - Worrying about Virus Alerts

What to do if you see it

Browser Popup
Click to see a larger image

Basics4Mac user Zupdoc sent me an email recently saying that she had seen a pop up in Safari warning her that her machine was infected with adware and viruses. I'm not sure if the image at the right is exactly what she saw but that is what I was able to find in Google. Zupdoc said that the Cancel button didn't do anything and that she was afraid to hit OK. (wise thinking)

She did a a forced shutdown of her computer but was worried about what she had experienced and if her computer really was infected.

I wasn't worried about it but I did a little research to see what exactly what was going on. Here is what I found:

The popup was offering to download something called Personal Antivirus. Personal Antivirus is a clever little thing: it downloads and installs itself and then tells you you must pay to remove the viruses. You enter your info and credit card number and Personal Antivirus steals it. Voilà: identity theft. Of course you never had any viruses to begin with. It is all a big scam.

So why wasn't I worried about it on Zupdoc's Mac? Because, like all browser popups that offer to download software, that software is Windows only. The software can download, but it won't run on a Mac. All you will get is a file in your Downloads folder that ends with .exe. You can safely send it to the Trash.

While the Windows world still fights regularly against virus and other malware, such things "in the wild" are mostly unheard of on the Mac side. I say "in the wild" because fairly often there will be a news story about a new Mac security vulnerability. Such things, however, while real, don't cause problems outside of demonstrations presented by the discoverer.

I won't go so far so say that you will never encounter some form of Mac malware, but the chances are very very slim. I've never run any anti malware software on any of my Macs and have never had a problem.

Related Items: Malware | Viruses

Worrying about Virus Alerts | 1 comments |

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Worrying about Virus Alerts

Authored by: chrisb on Sunday, August 16 2009

A reader sent me this and I thought it was worth sharing. (with her permission of course.)

Hi Chris, You may already have heard that the new Firefox version 3.5.2 has some incredible offerings. One of them is that Firefox checks every web page that you navigate to and let\'s you know if there is a virus there. Check it out. For this reason I don\'t use the Safari browser because Firefox not only saves your open tabs when you Quit Firefox, but it also now checks for viruses. And by the way, I did download Avast Anti Virus free for home users which I had on my PC and which will also alert me to any problems.
Sincerely,
Suzanne Cerny new Mac User, member of the Golden Gate Computer Society Mac User Group GGCS and also the Diablo Vallery Mac User Group DVMUG

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