This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

repeated messages that there is a system alert virus

  • 4 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • Last reply by James

more options

Getting repeated Firefox popups saying a virus has been detected attempts to connect me to McAfee security. My Windows Defender says there is no virus but the popups reappear when I've close them. I did a firefox refresh to no avail

Getting repeated Firefox popups saying a virus has been detected attempts to connect me to McAfee security. My Windows Defender says there is no virus but the popups reappear when I've close them. I did a firefox refresh to no avail

All Replies (4)

more options

Are these small popups in bottom corner? if so then they may just be Web Push Notifications from websites you have allowed to send you notifications. Unfortunately some sites may send what are basically fake virus or antivirus alerts.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/push-notifications-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/push-notifications-firefox#w_how-do-i-revoke-web-push-permissions-for-a-specific-site

Helpful?

more options

Thank you - I had mistakenly been on a malware site, these appeared about 20 minutes later and seemed to be from Firefox. I felt they were suspicious. I finally turned off notifications, and then turned them on again and they stopped. I downloaded malwarebytes and it did detect a pup-optional-booking https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/detections/pup-optional-booking which I quarantined. Do you think it could be the malware was disguising itself as Firefox notifications?

Helpful?

more options

That sounds like a site malware scam not something from the O/S or A/V software alert itself. You need to get someone like a computer shop to verify what kinda Browser infection your has on it here.

Helpful?

more options

No this is not due to an infection as it is just web push notifications about fake virus alerts or fake alerts from McAfee from site(s) that were allowed to send notifications from.

Helpful?

Ask a question

You must log in to your account to reply to posts. Please start a new question, if you do not have an account yet.