Is this a virus?

zwip778 said:

Hi,

For a couple of days, I have noticed something weird on my 2011 Macbook Air when I visit certain websites, such as the technology section of Google News. I tried to remove all the Safari extensions such as Pocket etc. but unfortunately it doesn't help. Here is a screenshot, if anyone can shed some lights on this problem it would be great!

Click to expand...

I don't think it's a virus because there is so little malware in the wild for OSX. So you are complaining about all the popups, right? I've loaded that site in Chrome and Safari and I don't see ANY popups. I do use adblock in ALL my browsers and I'm unwilling to turn it off even long enough to try to see what you see. I suggest you install an ad blocker as well as enable click to play for all plugins. Some sites won't work but you never have to worry about a loud commercial suddenly playing when you're in the quiet study room of the library.

I really hate sites that have overly sophisticated mouseover events. Perhaps you are passing over an item on the page that pops up a "share" dialog that you then have to dismiss. I've tried every setting, from compact to modern and still I don't see any popups. The only thing I get for mouseovers is a little bit of white on black text asking if I want real time coverage of a topic.

r0k said:

I don't think it's a virus because there is so little malware in the wild for OSX. So you are complaining about all the popups, right? I've loaded that site in Chrome and Safari and I don't see ANY popups. I do use adblock in ALL my browsers and I'm unwilling to turn it off even long enough to try to see what you see. I suggest you install an ad blocker as well as enable click to play for all plugins. Some sites won't work but you never have to worry about a loud commercial suddenly playing when you're in the quiet study room of the library.

Click to expand...

Ummm, in the screenshot there was an adblock button so the OP already has an ad blocker.

53kyle said:

Ummm, in the screenshot there was an adblock button so the OP already has an ad blocker.

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Doh! I didn't notice the adblock hand over there to the left of the URL bar. I mostly use Chrome so I wasn't expecting to see it there.

zwip778 said:

Thanks for your inputs

I have an Adblocker already installed in Safari.

This weird pop-up thing in only in Safari and affects only some web pages that would never allow ads like that. The most frequent time I encounter this weird pop-up which takes over the functionality of the whole web page is Google News in the Tech section. I also encountered that when browsing some other websites.

Disabling Javascript makes this problem go away but of course I need for other web pages and on top of that, I would like to know if other people are affected by that... Clearly, what I am trying to explain is that it's not an ad but rather looks like a Note-Taking tool like an Evernote Web-Clipper or something like that which went wrong.

Click to expand...

There is an add-on for Safari that allows you to selectively block javascript. It should help you out until you get to the bottom of this issue.

zwip778 said:

Hi,

For a couple of days, I have noticed something weird on my 2011 Macbook Air when I visit certain websites, such as the technology section of Google News. I tried to remove all the Safari extensions such as Pocket etc. but unfortunately it doesn't help. Here is a screenshot, if anyone can shed some lights on this problem it would be great!

Click to expand...

Do you have any apps or toolbars or extensions related to Evernote installed?

Macs are not immune to malware, but no true viruses exist in the wild that can run on Mac OS X, and there never have been any since it was released over 12 years ago. The only malware in the wild that can affect Mac OS X is a handful of trojans, which can be easily avoided by practicing safe computing (see below). 3rd party antivirus apps are not necessary to keep a Mac malware-free, as long as a user practices safe computing, as described in the following link.Read the What security steps should I take? section of the Mac Virus/Malware FAQ for tips on practicing safe computing.

zwip778 said:

Thanks everyone for the help.

I didn't have Evernote-extensions installed in Safari when I started to have this problem.

Also, the font/UI used in the pop-up seems to differ from the look and feel of Evernote. It looks more like Pocket to me, so that was the first extension I removed, but the result was unsuccessful.

I tried to remove all of the extensions but the problem persists which basically makes browsing the web impossible on many websites including the most common one Google!

Click to expand...

Follow every step of the following instructions precisely. Do not skip any steps.

1. Launch Activity Monitor
2. Change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes"
3. Click on the "% CPU" column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top). (If that column isn't visible, right-click on the column headings and check it, NOT "CPU Time")
4. Click on the System Memory tab at the bottom.
5. Take a screen shot of the entire Activity Monitor window, then scroll down to see the rest of the list, take another screen shot
6. Post your screenshots.