Posted on 03/08/2015 4:19:26 PM PDT by fatnotlazy
A friend of mine called in a panic. She received a pop up on her IMac saying her computer was compromised ahd that she should call "Apple Tech Support" at 1-800-656-8559. She called the number and was scammed for her credit card number to allegedly fix the problem. She has canceled her card and was told the charge would be removed and a new card issued. It's unclear whether the scammer has harvested any other sensitive information from her computer.
I told her to call the real Apple tech support number, but is there anything else she should do? If her computer is compromised, is there a remedy? An application or program she should run?
if you get one, call Apple.
Oh no, for-q.
"Elvis to the world"? "Apple want vulnerable to internet issues like windows was"?
Are you drinking again? Or only forget your meds? :) No, wait....
> Damn auto correct.
Sorry, you can't blame auto-correct. You saw what it substituted before you posted, if only for a second. You saw the "Elvis". You didn't have to hit [Post].
Just curious, what device are you posting from? FWIW, my iPad sometimes gives me bizarre auto-correct substitutions, which I usually catch before I hit [Post]. But I assume with your antipathy against Apple you wouldn't so much as let an iPad within 5 feet of you... what then is your auto-correcting tool of choice?
Anyway... Of course working on a Mac can't stop a naive user from responding to human-engineered malware threats. No one except Apple-hating trolls even suggests such a thing. The fact that no VIRUSES exist in the wild for OS-X certainly doesn't mean there isn't plenty of Mac-specific malware that targets the USER instead of the operating system itself.
I suggest you stop riding that particular hobby horse. It's quite dead, you know. And tilting at windmills like your alleged Apple invulnerability story, from a dead hobby horse, is surely going to bring you to grief eventually.
Welcome to the 21st century -- where malware exists for EVERYBODY because it targets... THE HUMAN USER! :)
Her computer is not frozen. . . it is just that they've loaded hundreds of the same pop-up pages and closing them looks like you haven't closed anything. You have to force quit the browser to get rid of them. And then re-open it without re-opening any tabs from previous session. It can be quite a pain to get rid of all those open damn windows.
Do you kiss your boyfriend with that mouth. I would tell you to go for-q-self but you’d probably screw that up too. I’ll just end it with you’re a complete ass. Have a nice day.
Command-option-W works really well to close all of them. :D So does Command-Q.
I would pour hemlock on the keyboard and wait...
That security by obscurity canard has been shot down multiple times in the past. It is ridiculous to keep bringing it up. There have been Windows Viruses, true viruses, written targeting Windows machines in which the vulnerable number of machines were fewer than 20,000. The Witty Worm when it was released targeted Windows Machines that had not been updated for a vulnerability in the Black Ice router. . . all 20,000 of them. Yet within 45 minutes of it being released onto the Internet all 20,000 were infected. Other viruses were written for even SMALLER populations.
There are almost 100 MILLION OS X Macs in the wild, most of the running completely bare naked, without any anti-virus protection at all except that which is built into OS X. It is known that Apple users are more affluent that Windows users. Those 100 million OS X Mac users are, to put it mildly, sitting ducks. Yet there has never been a successful true computer virus in over 17 years of trying. There simply is no viable vector in OS X to get the viruses to spread. NONE.
There are 57 known Trojan horse programs in eight distinct families for Apple OS X. . . but Apple's OS X will identify each and every one of them and the families to when they belong and WARN the user if they try to download, install, or run any of them. It takes an industrial strength STUPID user to get infected with any of these Trojans because they have to bypass the warning THREE TIMES, once at download, once at install, and once on first run, to get infected.
Apple's Security has Absolutely NOTHING to do with obscurity. IF someone could come up with a viable virus and found a vector that worked, every single Mac could be infected in a matter of minutes. It is just that difficult if not impossible to do it that in seventeen years no one has succeeded.
1. You've only "heard" that from lying Apple-hating trolls, not reputable Apple users or representatives.
Of course it's not true -- every consumer-grade computer made today is hackable given the proper conditions. It's certainly much more difficult to hack into an Apple computer than most others (Unix is very tough, which is why Max OS-X, based on Unix, is also tough), Linux is pretty tough, even Windows is much tougher than it used to be. But, for instance, given physical access to the computer, a hacker can hack into any machine given time and knowledge of the operating system and its vulnerabilities.
Stop listening to the lies of the Apple-hating trolls. They aren't doing you any favors. And if you have any Apple-loving acquaintances who are so naive that they believe such a tale, you can tell them that Dayglored, happy user of Macs since 1984 (that's 30+ years), says "That's not true".
2. It's extremely unlikely that the Mac has actually been compromised by the pop-up or your friend calling the 800 number. But it won't hurt to find a reputable free anti-malware scanner for OS-X and run it on the machine. There's a decent chance that this isn't the first time your friend has made this error and done something potentially harmful to the computer.
3. Tell your friend to get an ad blocker (e.g. AdBlock) for the browser, and use it.
Best FRegards,
Dayglored
Oh come on. I didn't say anything all that rude, I was just having a fun time with your little auto-correct screw-up. Please don't get so bristly, everybody makes mistakes. If I posted "Elvis to the world" I'd expect somebody to laugh at me and wonder what I was smoking, too.
And frankly, for someone like yourself, who takes every opportunity to troll and rant vehemently against things they obviously know very little about but hate passionately (Apple products), to call -me- a "complete ass", is actually pretty laughable.
But since I had, indeed, a very nice day, I'll be happy to thank you and leave you to yours, which unfortunately seems to have not been as pleasant. I sincerely hope it improves for you.
Have a great evening.
Almost fell for that one myself...hyuk hyuk.
The only way these work is if your computer is a big part of your life, like a buddy. Me? I can, have and will take a sledge hammer to mine at the drop of a hat.
“Google apparently took the liberty of matching my ip address with my gmail account to send me some Sprint marketing spam.”
Do not use google or gmail! It’s just a spy agency for it’s advertising clients. Use Ixquick! No IP tracking, no cookies.
sometimes, that's not so easy to do. . . many of these shareware sites open hundreds of identical Windows. . . and when you close one it appears as if nothing happened. I saw one of these on my own computer several years ago. Very frustrating until i figured out what was going on. Force quit the browser.
The PC Browsers do the same things. Same scam ads. No difference.
All you had was hundreds of identical windows. . . and each time you quite one it would open more. It's like fighting the hydra. Force quite Safari should have been sufficient. It can do nothing to your system.
That should not be necessary. It was on a website. The scam was to get her credit card.
totally unnecessary. She wasn't infected by anything. Nor do you need to do all that on a Mac. You Windows people don't really know Macs.
Again, unnecessary on a Mac. You guys on Windows must get very paranoid.
“….such as ghostery.”
Correct! And, using Ghostery you have the possibility to block everything except the comment section that follows some articles you read on the Net. I am using myself this great little free add-on.
You can also tell her that Swordmaker, the keeper of the 700 member Mac/Apple ping list on FreeRepublic, and a Mac user for longer than dayglored, will also tell you the same thing. Sit me down in front of any computer and I can get into in pretty short order. . . no matter how strong they think their protection might be. Physical possession of the computer basically means it can be owned by a hacker. It is REMOTE hacking that is very difficult and usually requires the cooperation of the user, and getting in by malware attack that is even harder on a Mac.
Now hold on one cotton-pickin' minute, Sword. How do you figure that? The Mac wasn't released until 1984. I used a Lisa for about a year before the Mac came out, but I didn't count that, as the Lisa was a different architecture. Are you saying you had access to pre-release Macs?
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