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virus?

4

4gotten soldier

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 20, 2007
10
0
hey all

i was on stumbleupon.com for the past few days.(everything has been clean in my stumbles) today, i was reading an article and all of the sudden my mac went int virus scan mode.

however, it was the virus scan mode for a PC, complete with all the PC icons and even box

i clicked out of it, because i didnt want to chance opening anything bad.

i did some research, and everything i found said there shouldnt be any viruses for macs

i just want to be extra safe, is there anything i can do to check for viruses?

i would prefer to not download anything, and if i must, i would prefer not to pay.

thanks
 
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?
 
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.
 
Ivan P said:
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?
Click to expand...

maybe i am just double checking to make sure i dont?

also, if i have something, it wont be a problem to me, but it may mean problems to my friends if i send emails or files.

thanks for the responses, i can rest assured i am personally clean
 
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
 
4gotten soldier said:
hey all

i was on stumbleupon.com for the past few days.(everything has been clean in my stumbles) today, i was reading an article and all of the sudden my mac went int virus scan mode.
Click to expand...

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.
 
Mhaddy said:
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.
Click to expand...

You spend too much time around geeks :D 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.
 
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