​Speaking of which...

Yes, Macs DO get Viruses
 
By BD Bondy

I wrote about Macs getting malware, viruses, etc., and today a friend brought over her MacBook with a peculiar pop-up message coming up in Safari warning about a Trojan, or a virus. It changed each time it appeared, and it appeared, in the upper right corner of Safari every 7 minutes or so, then quickly disappeared.

She was suspicious, good on her, and didn’t click on it. It was tricky because it didn’t appear and stay put, and I’d never seen that particular malware before. I had to look it up in Google, and the hard part about that is how do you word that question. Anyway, there were several suggestions. I cleared the history in Safari, cleared the cache, cookies, etc. I downloaded Malwarebytes, which didn’t find anything.

Eventually, I read about something similar that said to go into Safari, Preferences, Notifications, and remove the offending one. Well, there were about 20, and none of them screamed they were malware, so I removed all of them. And that seems to have taken care of the problem.

How it got there, I do not know. However, it likely piggy backed on something that she did want to install, and this thing came along for the ride. This type of attack is usually innocuous until you click on it and start following its directions. It’s best to track down the threat and eliminate it before it goes too far.
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I think the notification to remove for this threat may be called macosx-update.com. That was the most suspect of the notifications listed and when I looked it up, it suggested that it was indeed malware.