Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Apple mac help

Trying to download an instruction manual for my heating I clicked on a website that has infected my Apple laptop with a virus. Purporting to be from Windows 10 renew your licence. I don't have windows 10. Any body tell me how I can clear the continuing messages. Wants me to download Mcafee.

Force quit the program and restart the Mac.

Tried that still coming back

Use an anti virus. I use Avast and malwarebytes both free, not sure if you can reset a Mac to an earlier time like Windows. Lots of forums on the 'net too.

it is a very well known problem, but difficult to get rid off. There are many solutions te be found on the web, my wife keeps having this problem although it is protected and screened by an antivirus, Bitdefender and should be clean.
Good luck.

And everyone keeps telling me that Apple does not get viruses.

If it is a pop-up notification in Safari browser it is not really a virus, in that case it is just an undesired notification from a real or faked McAfee we site. You can go to Safari Preferences/ Settings/ Websites / Notifications and remove all sites listed (or at least those that you do not actually want).

Install Firefox and use it as a browser to see if you still get the pop-up.

If that does not work, do you have a backup, "Time Machine" on a Mac, that pre-dates the appearance of the pop-up? If all else fails you will have to reconfigure the system back to initial state and restore the backup.

This sort of thing highlights the one of reasons why you should always have a backup.

PS. I am not a lover of Apple products but unfortunately the female side of my family is. We actually have 3 Macbooks in the house of which 2 are in use. Fortunately Windows and Android outnumber the Apple products.

This. And whatever you do, don't download McAfee. There are a lot of sites purporting to have loads of user manuals on them, I just did a little test Googling "Worcester Bosch Heating Manual' as a search string and one of the top hits was an extremely dodgy looking site 'FreeBoilerManuals.com'. The name itself was enough to get me alarmed, let alone the appalling front page design. I wasn't prepared to even click on the apparent cookies acceptance dialog.

For stuff like this, always go to the manufacturer's site.

Thanks guys, I seem to have cleared it now but what a pain, I only wanted to reset the clock on my heating controller.

There is a thing called a "virtual machine" which can be run like an application on your computer.
This is a bit like running a minature of your operating system inside a window on your computer.

If you are confident enough to install and use one of these they are a great way of protecting yourself.
You install the VM software.
You create a software version of the operating system that runs on it's own inside your computers memory.
You login into the VM which is running on your computer and then from within this application/environment you can browse to the site and see what occurs.
If it is evil you logout of the VM and delete it.
I have yet to find a nasty that can escape out of this VM model and onto the main computer but one day.....

If you worry about a download then always stop and do a search on
1. Its URL and address
2. The web page it is hosted on
3. Any other unique item you can see on the screen that might be reported if you were to think about it.
These searches can flush out the bad stuff before you hit accept.

The point re going to the vendors site. Very good recommendation. Google rankings can be hijacked resulting in bad stuff being on the first page in some cases.
There is a lot available on the Apple support pages if you go to them as well.

If you get stuck you are always eelcome to get in touch.

Thanks Alistair.