When a server was a teenager, there was a constant panic about these computer viruses wanting to wipe out your entire hard drive. It is something that in my generation and previous ones has remained in our minds, even if today the predominant threats are the Phishing and the Spyware.
This is why some people with bad intentions and zero ethical level take advantage of this fear that has remained in some people to display what you see in the image above: a cascade of warnings in macOS alerting you to the presence of viruses. Don’t worry: it’s a lie and I’ll tell you how to eliminate these alerts.
Someone is using web notifications to scare us
One day, you may start using your Mac and find this in your notification area:
Virus notifications show no mercy, appearing repeatedly:
What to do before that? First thing, stay calm. Your Mac is not infected with any virus. When you see the Settings/System Preferences icon, you might think it’s a native macOS warning, but there’s no such warning on the Mac. If you click on it, you will get an alert like this:
I insist: calm down. what you see is a web notification disguised as a macOS notification, designed to trick you. You can confirm this by right-clicking on the notification:
“Ask you for notifications”? I caught you with the ice cream cart, mate.
At some point, unknowingly, you must have navigated to a website that must have asked your permission to send you notifications. Notifications that They try to scare you into clicking any of these warnings and spending money in a cleaning app that probably injects you malware in the computer.
So don’t worry: your Mac is fine, it just has a few web notifications trying to scare you into spending money. Let’s see how to eliminate these alerts.
In Safari, go to the menu with the name of the application and click on ‘Settings’:
In the window that appears, click on the ‘Websites’ tab and then on ‘Notifications’ in the sidebar:
You will see that a list will appear with websites that have requested permission to show you notifications. Use the drop-down menu after each item you don’t trust (or know about) to deny this permission, then select those same items and click “Delete” to remove them from the system:
Optionally, you can uncheck the box “Allow websites to ask permission to send notifications”. This way you make sure that you are not allowing any other website to happen again. Don’t do this if, for example, you want to continue receiving notifications from other websites: there are portals that do this honestly. At Applesfera, for example, we send one a day.
