Virus help

ClamXav is a great free virus protection for mac, so you could scan the macbook with that and see if anything is infected. Otherwise, maybe one of your parents went click happy on something

Ruffian829 said:

Hi all! My parents have an old white MacBook (from '08 I think) and they have verizon email. Their email got bombarded with "message not delivered" notifications the other day and verizon locked their email for 24 hours with a message saying there were 500 messages sent in under an hour and to update their virus software.

I figured it was their email that got hacked and not a virus on the Mac so I changed their password but that hasn't helped. They received 20 more "message not delivered" messages at 1:30 this morning.

I don't have virus protection on my MacBook and I've never had a problem before so I am not sure what to do for them. They use the MacBook mainly for email and online shopping at major stores like macys.com and such.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated! Thanks!

Click to expand...

It's not a virus, as none exist in the wild that can affect OS X. Their email account has been either hacked or spoofed. Even after you changed the password, you may still continue to get delivery failure messages from the time before you changed the password. Sometimes delivery failure messages come days after an email is sent.

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.