either A, you’re going to a LOT of questionable sites (or opening questionable emails) or B, your router could be compromised.

I’ve been a Mac user for many years, and have never once experienced these issues. Virus scanners for the Mac are pointless. There are no viruses for Macs. There are trojans and malware, but all of that requires end user intervention.

I would definately look into the router, but also try to browse safely, disable Flash, and install an adblocker to Safari.

Trouble seems to be tied to Yahoo. Or when I’m looking at news on Yahoo. Sucks because I use that for mail. Have two IMacs and the one I use for “dangerous” sites runs great. Same router for both.

Which model Mac do you have? How old is your machine?

Something happened to my one-year old MacBook Air so that the Safari Homepage is set to something called "chumsearch" and it cannot be reset. I'm planning on trying the Macafee product when we get home next week.

Good luck and Happy Fourth!

use Bitdefender. McAffee is terrible on every system.

Have a good Fourth.

Sophos is big in Europe. I have been using it for years, and it is good as the others. The home edition is free.

in fact i cliked on a few stories in the ads on du and the scanner poped up with a "infection blocked" message before i could do any thing.

I like ClamAV. Open source, and has been around for a while. I don't have any blocking software installed, but ClamAV does a good job scanning for junk.

https://www.clamav.net

Btw, if the bogus popups are happening from inside your browser, they could just be from horrible web sites. If they are popping up when you don't have a browser running .. then you need to look for (and remove) the malware that's running on your machine.

Last edited Thu Feb 14, 2019, 08:48 PM - Edit history (1)

This is an overview, not direct advice.

1. In every basic link we click, the HTTP is part of the "language" called HTML.
2. HTML usually contains the language of JAVASCRIPT.
3. JAVASCRIPT and cookies :
3a. are used when we login here.
3b. are part of how advertisers place ads and track us
3c. and a host of other things.

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4. if you get these fake virus warnings, make a note on paper what you just did.
4a. Example: you clicked on a website link in email.
4b. Example: you clicked on a website link in a website.
5. If you are unable to escape the fake warning by closing the window, I suggest rebooting the computer.

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6. I myself use more than 1 browser. In one of these browsers, in the past, I would have JAVASCRIPT turned off. This will break a lot of stuff. For example, you could not login to many websites in all probability.
7. Beachballs are possibly caused:
7a. by websites trying to switch to obscure websites.
7b. by websites trying to load obscore advertising (same as 7a overall but a different underlying technique)
7c. by websites in some type of circular loop or multiple website fast jumping. ( same as 7a and b, in effect)
7d. by a failing hard disk (less likely)
8. if you are still plagued by beachballs, post back here.

Welcome Tetra to DU.

I'm sitting here with a broken ankle, so I have time to catch up in the online world. Once upon a time, I did a few years of online posting in Mac forums.