vacuumspotlightvampire

This is on a mid 2011 iMac. About 30 minutes ago my girlfriend had a popup come up which said "update your video player now, directed to the website vacuumspotlightvampire, with an OK button. It blocked out any use of Safari. After rebooting the computer the pop up came back again. I searched on my phone and found one reference to it on the Apple website. Someone else had had this popup.

They were directed to hold down "command, option, delete" and force quit Safari. Then to reboot Safari while holding down the shift key. The instructions then said to shut off wifi, direct the computer to another website, and then turn wifi back on again.

The popup was gone from my computer after restarting Safari while holding down the shift key. I am not using wifi, I have a lan cable connected from my modem. I unplugged the cable, directed the computer to another website, and plugged the cable back in again. Not sure if this was necessary? Anyway, 30 minutes later and everything is still OK.

Just as an aside, I searched vacuumspotlightvampire once the computer was working again. I found a website which said that the domain name was registered just 9 hours ago?

Sorry for the longwinded post, just wanted to see if anyone else had run into this yet?

Regards
Dan

danno50 said:

Sorry for the longwinded post, just wanted to see if anyone else had run into this yet?

Click to expand...

This is not a unique situation. This particular website is nothing special…the names of the websites change…it the "MO" (Method of Operation) that is the same.

What you did…turn off WiFi, Quit Safari, reopen Safari, then turn WiFi back on is the solution. That's what's important.

You will run into this sort of thing with "bad" websites.

- Nick

Thank you, appreciate the answer.
Dan

I tried it without holding down the shift key and the was still there, but holding shift as danno50 suggested did remove it. So, to summarize danno50's procedure:

Quit Safari, Turn off WiFi, Re-open Safari while holding SHIFT key, Then turn WiFi back on.

I'm not sure if Internet connection off-on is necessary, but doing it works. Thanks to both danno50 and pigoo3.

-deac