Last week I checked my Yahoo mail. There’s a mail I get daily by subscription, but I never read it because I don’t need to at the moment. So I clicked the box and hit delete. I was taken to a page that said my Mac is infected, and it listed a bunch of files. All I have to do is click on the OK button to get rid of them. I searched for some of the files in Finder and, as expected, found none of them. I Force Quit Safari.
This morning I went through the same delete-the-email procedure and got a different page that had a dialogue box saying I was infected and that I should click OK. I tried to Quit Safari and got another box that said ‘Are you sure you want to leave this page?’ Force Quit.
Do I really have malware? Or was this an attempt to install some by getting me to click OK?
My Mac always warns me before I install an application – when I download a file. I need to enter my password. Would I have been warned if malware was being installed?
Does anyone else use Yahoo as one of their mail servers, and have you gotten this ‘virus warning’?
Well, that’s worrisome. It says that I do have malware, and that MacDefender is trying to install something worse. On the other hand, the image is not what I saw the first time. I got a window that listed several files and a small pop-up window. So maybe I don’t have that particular one. And again, I did not click anything, but force-quit Safari.
As I think of it, I may have gotten the first window (the one that listed the files) after clicking on an article on MSNBC. But the one this morning (which was different – blank page that did not finish loading, and the small pop-up with ‘OK’) was after deleting an email in Yahoo Mail.