virus?

Umm...there are no known viruses for Macs. There are a plethora of anti-virus software available.

 

I mean no offense, OP, but if there was logic applied... why would a (non existent) OS X virus be showing you a Windows-themed scanner?

 

Sounds like you were spoofed by one of those web sites that trick you into thinking you have a virus so you buy their software.

 

OP, as you said you did research and found there was nothing to worry about. So you need not to worry.

Plus, do an MR search, you will find plenty of these threads... Read those.

 

mmmmmm which site. wink wink. ahhhuuuummm. Ok seriously though. Yeah I've seen the same thing has an animated progress bar too. It seems to come from junk advertising. linked to some blog sites, if you go looking for the AM rapide and click images in google, one of the pictures has been hijacked and clicking on it triggers the screen.

I just force close safari and reopen. have ran a virus scan using iantivirus and it always come up clean.

Like the guys say here, looks like it's trying to flog something. Oh those poor pc user's..... I feel for them...... I really do ....................... not. lol

 

You just did.

Not necessary, rest easy, and this was free.

 

No it didn't. What happened was that your web page showed an animation picture that looked like a virus scan was running.

You no more had a virus, (and likely this is true even if you were on a PC), than you could have had dinner, were you to have been shown a picture of a large juicy steak cooked to perfection.

The next step, had you let it progress, would have been that the "scan" showed (surprise!) that you had a virus, and a nice offer to download a program to remove it for only $99 or some such. Had you then bought that application and installed it, then you'd have had been $99 out, and some malware (technically its not a virus) installed. Its likely that malware would be Windows only, though there are a couple of Mac examples floating around the net as well.

 

No offense to the OP, but this is the first time I've heard of anyone getting fooled by those animated images in pop-up boxes.

 

You spend too much time around geeks its a big earner for the scammers.

For example there was a massive fuss with the New York Times a few weeks back, one of their ads had one of these, caused a massive rumpus, and that was just with the Mac owning people who went out and BOUGHT virus software or reinstalled their systems, all sorts of stupid stuff.

Goodness knows what the PC folks did.

Look at it another way, someone went to a lot of trouble to code all that stuff up, either they are complete idiots, or they are targeting the people who panic when they see that stuff and are PC-illiterate enough to be fooled by it. I'm sure I saw a report recently about how much money its estimated they are making. Anyway, can't hang around here all day, go to go off and do some coding with GIFs.......

 

There are plenty of scam websites that try to sell you virus scanners.

They will show something that looks like a Windows virus scanner, which will then pretend to scan your computer for viruses, and inevitably it will find dozens of them. Doesn't matter whether you use Windows XP, Vista or 7, any version of MacOS, Linux, whatever, even if you go to the site with an iPhone it will do the same thing.

These sites are evil for several reasons: First, obviously they waste your time and make you worried without reason. Second, many people will _buy_ their "anti-virus" software and lose their money. Third, if you buy using a card, since they are scammers anyway, they will sell your card details to someone trying to empty your bank account. Fourth, since they are scammers, their "anti-virus" software will likely be some Trojan that will do all kinds of nasty things to your computer, like using it as a spambot or installing a keylogger to get more useful information from your computer.