Safari on Mac frozen with VIRUS FOUND popup

Force quit Safari, then restart Safari while holding the Shift key.

Read these:

http://www.thesafemac.com/

http://www.thesafemac.com/mmg/

You are quite welcome.

The exact same thing happened to me this morning. I was able to force quite Safari, but I'm still a bit spooked.

For yourself and Mike, there's no adware to be found because it isn't adware. Nor was anything downloaded or installed on your Mac in any way. As the articles explained, it's nothing more than a browser trick that keeps you from moving off the page once there.

There isn't even the slightest thing to be concerned about. Unless, that is, you actually called the number displayed and gave them your credit card number, or live remote access to your Mac.

Why Apple hasn't released a fix for these JavaScript loops yet seems strange to me. They certainly know about it, and users who believe these garbage pages, call the phone numbers and/or install the remote access software they convince you to install are getting fleeced daily.

I have been using Macintosh computers since 1984 and have not had a situation where the web browser is stuck.... In this case the screen was stuck on a security breach pop-up with a statement about error UR97L1DA2TA; it advised me to call some Apple Support number.

I used this post to solve the problem by force quitting Safari and then restarting it with the shift key pushed. Instant fix.

Thanks a bunch!!!!!!!!

thanks

I got the mac-onlinehelp.info popup and have force-quit Safari and relaunched with Shift key 6 or 7 times to no avail. Every time, yet another of these windows pops up. I have disconnected wifi, restarted Mac in safe mode. Nothing helps. Can't do anything in Safari at all. What a depressing mess.

In your case, it may actually be adware. Some of the nastier adware will pop up the same type of "warnings".

You can either follow Apple's manual instructions for removing adware, or use the free automated tool, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware for Mac.

It should be noted that Apple's manual removal instructions are typically outdated. Sometimes a lot outdated. It depends on when Apple last updated their instructions page. If you would prefer to manually remove the adware on your system, you can find much more up-to-date instructions on The Safe Mac's adware removal page.

A simple thing to try first is to go into Safari's preference and disable all extensions. If the popups stop, you know one of them is producing the adware. Turn them on one at a time and test. If the popups come back, you found at least one that is causing the garbage barrage. Disable it again and click the button to remove it.

Thanks, Kurt.

Re: Apple's manual instructions, launching Safari with Shift key down still opened all the junk.

Unable to access Safari Preferences - grayed out.

Downloaded Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. Scan picked up adware in Firefox, but not Safari. Following their instructions for what to do next, I searched but could not find any of the files they said to trash. Something wrong with Finder Search.

Installed latest version of Safari - made no difference. All the junk was still there.

Eventually, I restored Time Machine backup from yesterday and all appears well.

Unable to access Safari Preferences - grayed out.

That's usually associated with what has been mentioned above. Nothing more than a scam website that keeps the browser stuck in a constant JavaScript loop. The shift key trick is supposed to tell Safari not to reload any of the web sites that were open in the last session. So it should open blank. The only reason it wouldn't is that something changed your default startup page to the same site the scam is on, so no matter how many times you try, Safari will start at the same page.

Eventually, I restored Time Machine backup from yesterday and all appears well.

Good. It shouldn't take that much time and effort to fix this issue, but at least it did by virtue of TM not having yet backed up the Mac in the state is was in with the ads popping up.