Malware/Virus

[Woofie2010]

Hi,
My sister has a 2014 Macbook air, and she has been asking me to help her, as she has a virus or some sort of malware on her Mac.

I suggested she just download malwarbytes which came back and removed some stuff from her mac, but she still gets the message when she uses Safari. I suggested she reinstall OSX, but she not to keen on it.

She made the silly mistake of calling them, but then hung up when they wanted access to her Mac, and she says her internet now only works sometimes.

Anyone have any ideas how to get rid of it?

 

[Pakaku]

So what happens when you boot up safari? It's not something as simple as a bad homepage, is it?

 

[michaelsviews]

Reboot and reload the OS, Call Applecare, doesn't matter if its in warranty or not they'd help to a certain I'm sure of that. Goto a local store and they'll boot it up and run virus software on the computer, it does not install to the computer it's run over there network. Lot's of options

 

[Woofie2010]

So what happens when you boot up safari? It's not something as simple as a bad homepage, is it?

No it's not the home page.

As she will be randomly browsing the internet and then this will pop us

 

[Cave Man]

Do Australian phone numbers only have 9 digits? 800-954-288. Are you sure this is a genuine Apple phone number and not some kind of phishing scam?

 

[ApfelKuchen]

It's a web page. If she keeps going back to the same web sites, she may keep getting the same thing. It's just a web page. It could just as easily display today's weather or sports scores, but the people who put up pages like this (and there are many of them) want people to get scared and call that tech support number.

Reinstalling the operating system won't fix it, though depending on what version of the operating system she has, maybe upgrading to a higher version may help somewhat. What version is she using now?

You said it's not the home page. Have you checked Safari preferences to be sure? One thing that adware does is change the home page or search engine (Apple eliminated the search engine problem in recent versions of Safari by limiting the search engine options). Malwarebytes does not "fix" the home page when it cleans up adware, presumably because they don't know what the user wants to have as their home page.

It could also be in browsing history. Try clearing Safari history. Also, restart Safari "clean" - Quit Safari, then hold the Shift key while re-opening Safari. That will force Safari to forget the "saved state" (currently open pages and tabs).

Adware (which is nearly always removed effectively by Malwarebytes) will often redirect people to pages like this, so running Malwarebytes again may not be a bad idea - she may have been reinfected.

Rule #1 in avoiding malware/adware infections - don't trust download links in popups. If you get a pop-up saying "you need to install/update X," go directly to the source - Adobe.com for Flash, Microsoft.com for Silverlight, etc. - don't click the link in the popup.

 

[CoastalOR]

Have her check the extensions installed in the browser.

I had a neighbor that was having problems with undesired site redirection. I ran Malwarebytes which found and removed some adware, but everything was not fixed. I checked her browser extensions, most I recognized, but some I did not. I disabled all extensions which solved the problem. I then enabled extensions one at a time until the problem returned. The offending extension was deleted and no more problems.

EDIT:If using Safari; also have her check her Homepage URL in the Safari Preferences...>General to make sure it is not set to a problem location.