The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state.

You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site.

We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.

Fake virus warning sent via Safari Notifications

This happened to a client of mine. (I'll have to look up her OS X version).

What I discovered, is the bad guys manipulated Safari's Notification to make it look like a virus alert was coming from Mac OS.

Under Safari -> Settings -> Websites -> Notifications there was an entry that had no website name, but had an entry. (Sorry, I didn't think of taking a picture of this.)

Removing this entry caused the problem to go away.

Here's the alerts she got:

Posted on Apr 23, 2024 7:04 PM

Top-ranking reply

Mac Jim ID

Community+ 2026

Level 10

106,006 points

Posted on Apr 30, 2024 7:18 PM

CA-Wind-Rider wrote:

Yes, I'm reporting the same thing.

Go to Safari > Settings > Websites > Notifications, and remove all notifications there. On some websites you will see a message asking if your would like the site to send you notifications. These sites are added here and some of them will pop up these fake virus warnings. Personally, I never allow a site to send Notifications, so I recommend to remove all of them.

View in context

Fake virus warning sent via Safari Notifications

Similar questions