This ingenious method wants to trick you, but we can fix it

When a server was a teenager, there was a constant panic about these computer viruses that wanted to wipe your entire hard drive. This is something that has stuck in our minds in my generation and generations past, even though the threats are prevalent today phishing and the spyware.

Because of this, some people with ill intentions and a zero ethical level exploit the fear that has remained with some people to show what you see in the image above: a cascade of alerts in macOS alerting you to the presence of viruses. Don’t worry: it’s a lie and I’ll tell you how to get rid of these warnings.

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 know no mercy and keep popping up:

What to do beforehand First of all, stay calm. Your Mac is not infected by any virus. When you see the Preferences/System Preferences icon, you might think it’s a native macOS alert, but this type of alert doesn’t exist on the Mac. If you click on it, you will get a warning like this:

I insist: calm down. what you see is a web notification disguised as a macOS notification designed to fool you. You can confirm it by right-clicking on the notification:

At some point you must have unknowingly visited a website that must have asked your permission to send you notifications. notifications that They try to trick you into clicking on one of these alerts and spending money in a cleaning application that probably splashes you malware in the computer.

So don’t worry: your Mac is fine, it just has some web notifications trying to scare you and make you spend money. Let’s see how to get rid of these warnings.

In Safari, go to the menu with the application name and click on “Preferences”:

In the window that appears, click the Websites tab, then click Notifications in the sidebar:

You’ll see a list of the websites that have asked permission to show you notifications appear. Use the drop-down menu after each item you don’t trust (or don’t know) to deny this permission, then select the same items and click “Delete” to remove them from the system :

Optionally, uncheck the “Allow sites to request authorization to send notifications” check box. This way you ensure that you do not give any other website permission for this to happen again. Don’t do it if you want to keep getting notifications from other sites, for example: there are portals that honestly do it. At Applesfera, for example, we ship one a day.