Help! Is this a bogus security message?

Greetings all, thanks for looking at my question.

I was browsing the web for some specific music to include in a video. I hit on one site and as soon as I got there I got a pop up on Safari saying I had a "Critical Security Warning". I couldn't get rid of it. I rebooted Safari and got the message and pop-up in the screen shot below. I quit Safari again and am now using Chrome without issue. I can't seem to restart Safari without getting these messages. I called the number shown but was on hold for a long time before I just hung up. I suspect this is a scam to get me to buy software, but it has taken over Safari.

Anybody have any ideas? Is this legit, or bogus?

Thanks,

Kevin H.

It's a scam (the bad spelling and grammar alone give it away).

Follow this to kill Safari's saved state - that should solve the issue for you. Once that is done, clear Safari's history and cache.

vansmith said:

It's a scam (the bad spelling and grammar alone give it away).

Follow this to kill Safari's saved state - that should solve the issue for you. Once that is done, clear Safari's history and cache.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the link. Re-starting Safari with the Shift key pressed allowed Safari to start without loading previous sites. I then cleared history and cache and everything seems to be running fine. I've started a virus scan just to be sure.

Great answer, thanks,

Kevin H.

kjhart0133 said:

Thanks for the link. Re-starting Safari with the Shift key pressed allowed Safari to start without loading previous sites. I then cleared history and cache and everything seems to be running fine. I've started a virus scan just to be sure.

Great answer, thanks,

Kevin H.

Click to expand...

No matter which virus scanner you're using about the worst it will find I'll safely bet it won't find anything related to this issue. This is the kind of browser-related malware that usually isn't caught by virus checkers. You'd be better off running the Mac version of Malware Bytes

If a virus is found, it will likely be a Windows virus in an e-mail attachment. Just about every Mac virus checker that I am aware of uses Windows based virus definition files because AFAIK there are no Mac viruses in the wild to base the definitions upon.

And why do they use Windows based virus definitions? As Sly said no Mac OS X viruses, despite AV Developers calling adware and malware viruses to market their product.