Trojan Horse Warning

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I was surfing around about 10 minutes ago and got this weird page that came up and looks just like MY COMPUTER on a Windows machine. It indicated that I had all sorts of trojan.download viruses on various drives. A dialog box came up with the Safari logo saying that I needed to go to a site to download malware protection.

screen-capture.png

Then this box:

screen-capture-1.png

I immediately went to Mac support and saw that this program was recommended. I went to the site and began a download:
screen-capture-2.png

During the download I looked around some more and found a thread on Apple Support where people were saying that it is not an issue and not to worry about it. I'm confused. I stopped the download but now I'm not sure that the site I was downloading from was legit. Can anyone straighten this out for me? I've had this MacBook for over 1.5 years and never a problem. Also, I don't know if it matters, but I had my brothers Western Digital 320GB external drive plugged into mine and was looking thru his iTunes library. He uses this ext. drive with his iMac though, so its not like it's attached to a PC or something.... Very strange.
 
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Its some windows security software that is really a trojan, look how it poped up false windows XP alerts, the whole thing is engineered to get you to download AntiVirus 360 - which is itself a piece of malware

Ignore the fake scan and its alerts that OS X has somehow been infected (with windows malware???)

You are not infected and do not need MacScan (which is legit software but not needed at this point)

Never download software from untrusted sites, and never believe those virus scan sites, it is not possible to remotely scan your computers hard drive from a webpage
 
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Whew. Ok. I knew something just didn't look right. So as far as cutting out the MacScan download half way thru I should be ok? This is strange because I don't remember what site I was at but it wasn't something I would typically associate with Malware or Spyware (like porn).
 
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Also, notice the poor English on their site, (and in the dialogues) a sure sign of scammers
 
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A few other things tipped me off: notice how the address in the address bar states "promo" and the bad grammar in the first screenshot dialog box "They can cause data loss and file DAMAGES and need to be CURED..." Rather tortured syntax.
 
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Sorry, looks like we were both thinking the same thing at the same time! Long and short: should I be looking to change passwords or should I do any sort of scan on my drives to be sure there is no problem?
 
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Don't leave me hanging guys! I'm still just trying to make sure that there are no other preventative measures I should be taking like scanning my drives or something. :)
 

bobtomay

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edit:

Ignore the fake scan and its alerts that OS X has somehow been infected (with windows malware???)

You are not infected and do not need MacScan (which is legit software but not needed at this point)

louishen has already gotten it right - not sure how much reassurances you need.

If you need to appease your own mind, download ClamXav.
 
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funny what these people won't think about, many Windows users will fall for that without noticing anything strange
 

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funny what these people won't think about, many Windows users will fall for that without noticing anything strange


Very true and many do who's systems I later repair.

Mac users though take note, look at the hard drives, C, D. OSX does not use Drive letters. OSX does not have a registry to scan either which most of those fake online scanning things show.
 

bobtomay

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The last tech support call I got, a friend 'A' had another friend 'B' over.
Last time I fixed A's machine, I put on AVG and had Spybot's Teatimer running on it.

Well, 'B' had never heard of AVG and decided that 'A' needed Norton on his machine. So now he's got 2 anti-virus apps running. 'B' had gone mucking about in the Norton settings and now 'A' had no internet connection. He had Norton setup so good, they couldn't even access the router.

He wanted me to fix Norton. Told him I hadn't used Norton in maybe 10 years, but yeah, I'd fix it all right. Had him remove it and then proclaimed "all fixed".
 
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Ok, thanks guys. REALLY appreciated. This is all good info to have. :D
 
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