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The horror, the horror....... mac spyware?

TJRiver

TJRiver

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 14, 2009
269
0
My wife used Google last night to go to a link on a movie she just watched. (we have a Core 2 duo imac running with Tiger and she was on Safari) and the website she ended up on tried to hijack the machine. It appeared to be Safari specific spyware, selling some BS anti virus program. Tell me this crud is not going to be a problem on my mac. This is the major reason we switched.

I was much more interested in getting Safari to shut down, so I did not note the name. The website was able to block the normal Safari shut down procedure and I had to do a force quit to get it closed. HELP!:mad:
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5G77 Safari/525.20)

That's weird. I've really never run into that issue and I've been using Safari since it came out. It may have been some sort of compatibility issue with either the website itself or the movie that she was linking from. It could also be spyware but I would lean more toward the compatibility issue.

At any rate I'd go ahead and clear the browser cache and any cookies that you may have.
 
TJRiver said:
My wife used Google last night to go to a link on a movie she just watched. (we have a Core 2 duo imac running with Tiger and she was on Safari) and the website she ended up on tried to hijack the machine. It appeared to be Safari specific spyware, selling some BS anti virus program. Tell me this crud is not going to be a problem on my mac. This is the major reason we switched.

I was much more interested in getting Safari to shut down, so I did not note the name. The website was able to block the normal Safari shut down procedure and I had to do a force quit to get it closed. HELP!:mad:
Click to expand...

May well have been a rollover flash type advert that Locked up Safari due to its size but certainly require more info so that the community can investigate
 
I think you ran into terrorware advertising, not anything that checks your machine.

Simply an advertisement that flashed up a "you are infected, please buy our crap" message -- because you are really really gullible.

They learned to get around most of the popup blockers, so it is more troublesome if they sell their code before it is patched in the next popup blocker upate.
 
Spyware

Hey crew, thanks for the input. Maybe I need to clarify a few things. The movie was on TV, not the internet. My wife was just looking for site like imdb with some info on the movie she had just finished watching on TV and Googgled to site that led to the "spyware".

As I noted in the initial post, I did not get the website info, as I was much more interested in shutting down the website before it tried to download some crud into my nice clean Mac. In the light of day, I realized that it would be very difficult to download any program w/o getting admin level approval, which my wife swears she did not do.

I have been doing some homework this morning and I am concerned that MacSweep seems to be the only program for this stuff. I do like having a choice..... I guess should have been more specific. Can just visting a website allow a program to disable the ability to shut down Safari w/o installing a program on the computer? Sintra1 it sounds like you have an interesting point. Would the situation you describe keep Safari from shutting down normally, e.g. generating a message stating "you cannot shut down Safari"?

SunBaked, I do hope you are speaking metaphorically. My wife has been involved with computers and programing since the seventies, and while I do not claim to be an expert in any way, shape or form, I do know enough not to get tricking by a phishing ploy.

Thanks for the help so far! If it reoccurs, I will get all of the information I can and post again. I have a pretty much dead Windows box and I would hate to see my iMac have any of the same sort of problems......:D
 
Just so I have this right.

You got sent to a website and the website had a pop-up? And you were unable to close this pop-up, therefore used force-quit to kill safari?

I don't know what "tried to hijack the machine" specifically means.
 
It is the newest ad for antivirus on the mac, there are several threads on it.

This new popup ad really sucks, and if you don't catch on real quick. You'd think it was something else.

Awhile ago, it was the Firefox users complaining about how it got around the popup blocker. I am not surprised these guys did the same with Safari.

---

It isn't loading anything on the machine, and just hijacking the browser window until you close it. Of course on FF it put you right back where you were, if it isn't releasing cleanly on Safari -- might be a coding issue on their end.

On the Macs, we get a lot of compatibility issues with web pages. Safari seems to be a lot of the complaints.
 
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