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Persistent Safari pop up

Avatar Peter Shepheard
I have just had a problem where a popup appeared saying a Flash Player update was available. The fact that it was connected with a company 5Softwaredr.com alerted me and I tried getting rid of it. This proved quite difficult. I could not get into Safari Preferences (greyed out). Exiting and restarting Safari did not help. Complete shutdown did not help. In the end I found a seemingly good solution "Press and hold Shift while launching Safari from the Dock" This has worked but deleted all my bookmarks - luckily I have a back up!
I pass this on in case anyone else has this problem and to ask if:
Does anyone have a better way of resolving such issues?
Is there any likelihood that something untoward has been installed on my system? How can I check?

I did NOT press any OK, Download or Install buttons!

Sorry I haven't been attending any recent meetings. I will try to get there soon.

Peter

Re: Persistent Safari pop up

Avatar Euan Williams
Hi Peter. This may help: "Malwarebytes Anti-Malware" (was "AdwareMedic"). It's free for non-business use from here.. The instructions are clear, and don't forget the "second check"! Let us know if it works for your particular problem.

Re: Persistent Safari pop up

Avatar Douglas Cheney
You can download a Safari Extension which will generally stop this happening, it is called ScamZapper and I have found this very good

Re: Persistent Safari pop up

Avatar Peter Shepheard
Euan and Doug thank you both for your replies.
I am pleased to say Malwarebytes reported nothing found and as it says on the tin it scans in seconds. I have not discovered the "second check"! Perhaps Euan you can explain?
ScamZapper may have prevented my problem and looks a useful Safari Extension. It is a bit fussy about its location and would only run when in the Applications folder NOT a sub folder.

Re: Persistent Safari pop up

Avatar Euan Williams
Hi Peter, 5softwaredr.com is reported by Google as a Phishing site and blocked (although the block can be by-passed). Malwarebytes would not have responded to this, as MWB's main focus is to rid users of software such as the dismal swamp of MacKeeper which can reduce Safari et al to simply displaying ads. The Second Check I mentioned is recommended by MWB to recheck that dodgy files have all been removed after the first pass. Let's call it "second pass check" :)

Re: Persistent Safari pop up

Avatar Tony Still
Hi Peter,
I had a similar experience recently and didn't want to lose my (many) other open tabs. The one that I encountered was a pathetic lying *#*# @!@!@ pop-up claiming that I had a virus and demanding money for an anti-virus program to give me back control of Safari; it's really just a simple script-kiddy piece of Javascript but annoying even so. A nasty, dirty solution may get you around it:
Safari in its latest versions runs a task ("process") for each open web site (this greatly improves Safari's stability since a site crashing a dedicated task is a lot less disruptive than taking down the whole browser). You can see all of these tasks in Activity Monitor and their names are helpfully the URLs of the pages concerned.
Turn off your WiFi (or whatever route you're using to the Internet), then highlight the task in Activity Monitor and click the Force Quit button (X) in the tool bar. Then - quickly - close the tab or access Safari's Preferences and turn-off Javascript. If you're quick enough, that should stop the tab from disabling Safari's controls. You can then close the tab if it's still open and clean-up anything else (like turning Javascript back on).
NB I wouldn't normally advise quitting processes from Activity Monitor, it can disrupt your system's operation. It's a last resort and this is a dirty way around the problem.

Look forward to seeing you at meetings again. You missed a cracker on Photos last week... ;-)
 
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