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I just recieved a virus notification, what do I...

For the past few days my computer has been very laggy, and not working properly. I was on Safari today and a window popped up about a virus warning, and it would not let me close out of the window. Now every time I open Safari that message pops up. I hear that apple has a no virus guarantee, is this true? If so, what do they do when a computer gets a virus on it?

Remove Adware and Pop-ups

The Safe Mac » Adware Removal Guide

AdwareMedic

Remove unwanted adware that displays pop-up ads and graphics on your Mac - Apple Support

When you see the pop-up Force Quit it.

1. Force Quit .

    Press command + option + esc keys together at the same time. Wait.

    When Force Quit window appears, select  Safari if not already.

    Press Force Quit button at the bottom of the window.   Wait.

    Safari will quit.

2. Relaunch Safari holding the shift key down.

kayla.b25 wrote:

 

I was on Safari today and a window popped up about a virus warning, and it would not let me close out of the window. Now every time I open Safari that message pops up.

That is a fake tech support scam. No malware is involved. For more information, including how to get rid of it, see:

Tech support scam pop-ups

I hear that apple has a no virus guarantee, is this true?

No, that is not true. Malware on the Mac is rare, but it does exist. See my Mac Malware Guide.

(Fair disclosure: I may receive compensation from links to my sites, TheSafeMac.com and AdwareMedic.com.)

When I have called Apple Support about this, in the past year, they have advised me to install Malwarebytes.  I didn't think that was legal for them to do but there you have it.  At any rate, I found today that I had 4 security threats, which Malwarebytes was not able to eradicate but Avira was able to eradicate when using the Computer Scan (not the default Quick Scan):  497840.emix trojan, FedEx_invoice.zip trojan, cbsidlmsp1_0_881-SuperDuper-SEO-46651.dmg virus, Adobe Flash Player-2.dmg adware.  For this reason, I would advise using Avira for security threats, in addition to Malwarebytes.  For clarity, I ran a Malwarebytes scan before the Avira Computer Scan and it did not find anything.  The symptoms of the problem were loss of control of the volume (there was no volume for a flash video on the web, for example, and the volume buttons had no effect) (another example was that a song started playing, which I did not start and could not figure out where it was playing from), actions on the screen like the mouse cursor moving around which I was not moving, a loud fan and slow response time when trying to do anything.  Since Avira is not yet available on the Apple Store, you would have to get it from the Avira website (www.avira.com).  Caveat:  since Apple does not recommend installing software that is not on the Apple Store, because it has not been properly certified by them, I would not recommend installing Avira unless you run into the symptoms I have listed above and Malwarebytes does not solve the problem.  Hopefully, Avira will have a version of their product available on the Apple Store, soon.

Correction:  since Malwarebytes is also not available on the Apple Store, I would recommend installing Avira, even if you don't have these symptoms.  I have had both products installed for months without incident.  But note that Avira did not actually prevent these threats from becoming installed, in the first place.  So you may have to run Computer Scans manually, when you notice problems.

Hello Hot Potato,

MalwareBytes will never be available in the Mac App Store. That is not a factor of be approved by or recommended by Apple. Apps in the Mac App Store must run with very restricted permissions and capabilities. Most apps don't need that so they can be in the Mac App Store if the developers agree to Apple's 30% cut of revenue and heavy control of business model, marketing, and release schedule. It simply isn't possible to have a legitimate anti-virus or anti-adware tool in the Mac App Store. That doesn't stop people from taking other people's money anyway.

MalwareBytes only scans for adware that could actually be running on your system. It doesn't do that kind of full disk scan since such software is harmless unless you install it. The current version of MalwareBytes will prevent said malware from being ever being installed. To make matters worse, sometimes that harmless software is in some kind of internal database, like your email database. If you use some 3rd party tool to remove it, you could corrupt your email.

It can be very difficult to evaluate security software. If you only gauge it by how many "threats" it finds, whether or not they can hurt you, then what would stop some fraudulent company from just showing you longer and longer lists of fake malware? That is exactly the business model of a thriving industry of fake security tools. Avira is not one of those, but it is also not identifying anything that is actually installed or running on your machine.

最后更新：2017-09-10 10:54:31

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