Quote of the day:

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
—Bertrand Russell

Great Caesar’s Ghost!!!!!

Those are not precisely the words that I was repeating for a couple hours, but readers are encouraged to use their imaginations to guess which profanities were issuing practically non-stop from my mouth.

It all started just before lunch on Sunday when I wanted to get German subtitles for a movie (I’ll explain why in a future post). So I went to the open subtitles site, a place where I’ve downloaded oodles of subtitle files in the past with nary a problem.

Except this time, when I clicked on what I thought was the German subtitle file I received a warning that I was about to enter a dangerous web site and I should stop and retreat. Silly me, I ignored the warning.

Not only didn’t I get the the German subtitles, but in short order I had one of those annoying pop-ups telling me that my McAfee anti-virus software had expired and to click to get it renewed. I knew it was a fake because I don’t have McAfee software, and I realized that I now had an infected Mac. The pop-up kept reappearing every couple of minutes.

But, I thought, this should be easy enough to vanquish. Just run the anti-malware software that I have and that should take care of it.

But it didn’t. The anti-malware software crashed. Apparently I hadn’t updated recently. Oh, well, that was easy enough to fix. Which I did. But it didn’t find any malware.

So I did a web search on how to get rid of the fake McAfee pop-ups. There were plenty of hits on that, so I chose one that seemed reasonable.

Alas, it wanted me to purge my Safari browser. But that would mean I’d have to re-login to all those web sites!

Great Caesar’s Ghost!

So I bit the bullet and got rid of all the Safari cookies and cleared the cache.

But that didn’t fix the problem.

Next step. Check all the web sites in the list that Safari allows to issue pop-ups. That seemed to be ok. Most of the web sites in the list were marked as Deny. There were only a few that were listed as Allow, such as Update-Macosx.com and ReadingTerminal.com, and those seemed ok, except why did I want to Allow the ReadingTerminal to issue a pop-up? So I changed that to Deny.

Then I had to check all my Safari Extensions. But they seemed to be all right. There weren’t any that I didn’t recognize. But suppose the malware disguised itself as a familiar extension? Or piggy-backed itself onto an existing one? So I disabled all of them and waited. And the pop-ups still appeared. Clearly, extensions weren’t the problem, so I re-enabled them.

I checked other web sites in my search for how to rid myself of this meddlesome priest, I mean, pest. There were a few suggestions, but most of the sites were just trying to sell their own version of anti-malware software. 

I was tearing my hair out at this point. And I don’t have that much to tear out.

I thought I’d give Apple a call, but I realized that the first thing they would ask is whether I have the latest version of Mac OS installed. I do not. I’ve been holding off because. Well, never mind.

And then, just on a last desperate effort, I began to repeat the steps I took before. Like going through the list of web sites that Safari will allow to do pop-ups. And I once again saw Update-Macosx.com. And I thought, I’m really not sure that that is a valid web site. After all, Apple doesn’t update the Mac OS via the Safari browser. Why don’t I mark that as Deny? In fact, why don’t I go ahead and delete the damn thing? If it’s really a valid web site, I’ll find out soon enough and I’ll add it back. So I deleted it and waited.

I’m not sure just how long the interval between pop-ups was. I knew it was something less than five minutes, but I wasn’t exactly certain. 

But I waited and stared at the upper right corner of the screen, which is where the pop-ups appeared. After two minutes, I began to feel optimistic. After three, I felt for sure that I had solved that problem, but I wanted to wait the full five minutes just to be positive. It may have been the longest five minutes of my life so far.

But I did solve it.

Hoo-ray!