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Virus/ Malware problem

sbluetruck

sbluetruck

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 25, 2007
207
0
Wisconsin der hey
So my mom was doing the crossword on USA Today the other day and she ran across several pop ups which said "your windows system is compromised" and all that jazz. Well, seeing as we just had a very similar problem with out Dell computer, my dad thought it wise to scan the iBook for errors, and to his surprise found two viruses/ malware files. If I were not at school right now, I would be able to name the files, but the computer is scanning again and I'll just have to wait until I get home.
I don't think that the files have done any harm, but I'm going to go through and clean out any files related to safari, such as caches, cookies, logs, just general files which can go. The problem is pretty much web browser based, and I was thinking that it revolved around the 3.1 update. I was wondering if anyone had any tips as what else to do.

Thank you SOOOOO much!
 
There are no viruses for OS X. The 'viruses' picked up by your virus scanner are viruses which only affect Windows, but can still be 'carried' by a Mac (not something to worry about in my experience).

It was most likely a popup from whatever website she was on.
 
Like the previous two post said, these "viruses" are most likely harmless on a Mac, and dependant upon which virus/malware scanner you use, they may not even be viruses (I've used virus scanners before that list advertising tracking cookies as "critical"). It seems a lot of virus scanner manufacturers over hype these in order to get people to continue paying for their virus database updates subscription.
Anyway, clean and remove them by all means, but they're highly unlikely to have done any damage. Especially on an iBook which uses a PPC processor, unlike all PCs and more recent Macs, which use x86 processors.
 
Pop ups from a browser like that are simply a BS way to shill for AV/Security software sites. It happens all the time. It simply says "Your Windows blah blah" because it knows that 90% of all people hitting the site will be on a Windows box. But it's not for real.

EDIT:
Just for giggles, I hit the USA Today site and it took me about 30 seconds to get all this bull**** right here. Please note in picture 1 that I have a PPC Mac and no possibility of having Windows or being 'infected'.

These types of advertisements are disingenuous and should be illegal.
 

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As others have said. That popup isn't a virus/malware and it hasn't detected anything. It is a popup trying to trick you into thinking you have a problem so that you will click their link and buy their product.
 
I was a work once and one of the students,( on a PC )decided to open up one of those free scan pops it auto-
downloaded and i spent the rest of the day having to re-install XP and all the sh*t that goes with it

These sites & auto-downloads should be wiped of the face of the www
 
cohibadad said:
As others have said. That popup isn't a virus/malware and it hasn't detected anything. It is a popup trying to trick you into thinking you have a problem so that you will click their link and buy their product.
Click to expand...

What's even worse is that sometimes that "product" that you download happens to be actual malware, that the "vendor" will then gladly sell you the utility to remove. :rolleyes:

Fortunately, none of this stuff will run on a Mac yet. So for now it's all false popups, that are quite annoying.

Yet another reason why I switched: the Windows situation has gotten to a point where you can't trust anything, even those who are claiming to want to "help" by selling you virus and malware protection. Even the big names now are a little shady, jacking up fees and tacking on bloatware to the point where more resources are spent "defending" against malware and viruses than is actually spent doing the work *you* want to do.

I'm not saying OS X is 100% perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than WIndows in this regard, and at least when a security issue does pop up, Apple fixes it, instead of saying "well, for $40 a year you can buy and install this product from these companies. Or you could just run an unsafe machine." Ugh.
 
Well, first I would like to thank all of you for your responses, I really appreciate it. I knew for a fact this wasn't an Mac virus because I went through the Norton dictionary with my dad and confirmed to him that it is in fact the same windows virus which crippled our XP system to the point of having to reinstall. The reason my dad originally thought it was a virus was because these "popups" would use IE on the Dell to try and trick us into downloading things, then it would download itself. These are just simple cache files, and I checked, block popups WAS on, yet no pop up blocker is perfect. I'm assuming that my mom just bumped the trackpad click when she was doing her crossword. She noticed that it was just a simple mistake and also noticed that the popup was not anything system at all, so she asked me what it was and I got suspicious because it looked familiar.

THANKFULLY Norton quarantined and deleted the files per request and everything is back to normal. My dad was not worried about the iBook as much as he was crippling the Dell again until he can fix it the right way again.

EDIT: I normally "reset" safari monthly under my account to clear out the cache and cookies for various reasons. since this was a cache file, would doing any of this help?
 
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