[peejee]

Dear Techsupport.

I clicked on a website link that I was led to believe was a football/soccer fansite called WhiteLeeds.com | Another Fansite. on Saturday.

However when the page loaded it was not a soccer fansite...at least not yet...and the URL quickly changed to www.wurldnews.com and a page loaded a screenshot of which you can see below:

An advertisement pop-up then came up which I closed immediately.

I presume this was a holding page until the fansite went live?

Ever since unintentionally viewing that page I've noticed the following changes:

- Webpages load about 10% slower.
- The loading bar (at the top of a safari page) occasionally stalls at about a 1/8 of the way along for about 4 or 5 seconds or more.
- When I scroll down a page it occasionally the page "stutters" down instead of scrolling smoothly.
- When I'm typing on a message board, like this one, occasionally the cursor "stalls" and then quickly makes up the missed word/letters I've typed (if that makes sense).

I'm on a Macbook Air running OS X 10.6.8 and Safari 5.1.7.

I've downloaded and run Avast for Mac and it found no infections but there were 5 "warnings" of which there were no details.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. At the very least I'd like to put my mind to rest. Many thanks for any help.

 

[sinclair_tm]

Have you restarted your Mac since this happened? Have you reset Safari (Warning, it'll remove history, saved passwords and such.)?

 

[peejee]

Have you restarted your Mac since this happened? Have you reset Safari (Warning, it'll remove history, saved passwords and such.)?

Hi Sinclair,

Thanks for response.

I have restarted my computer since.
I haven't reset Safari, I shall try that now.

 

[peejee]

Hi,

I've reset safari but the load bar still stutters and loads slowly sporadically throughout the day and at times websites load slowly and in sections even if I've visited them before (and web content therefore should've been saved as temp files).

Am I just being paranoid? What is the likelihood of my mac having been infected from just visiting that site?

Thanks for any help.

 

[sinclair_tm]

Likelihood of your Mac being infected, just about zero. What's more likely happening is there is a problem with your ISP service. If it's coming and going through the day, then that's what I'd blame, busy times and not busy times. Also try a different web browser and see if it has issues with the same sites. Also try power cycling your modem and router.

 

[williambjacobs]

I would suggest taking it in and upgrading your OS. I was having similar problems and took it in and had snow leopard installed for about $40 and it works a lot better now.

 

[MartyF81]

After doing what sinclair_tm suggested, I would suggest setting up a new user account and see if the problem persists when you access your sites from a different user account. That will help establish if it is a system issue, or a userland issue.

You may also want to try installing an alternative browser like Chrome or Firefox. If they work fine, then it could be a Safari issue.

 

[peejee]

Wow. I can't tell you how much I appreciate the help.

Many thanks Sinclair, William and Marty.

 

[tomkent45]

I always thought a Mac could not get infected with a virus...

 

[sinclair_tm]

They can get them just like Windows. The thing is that there are so very few that your chances are about the same to get struck with lightning. Even less actually, because so few of those few are even "in the wild". Most are "hey, look what we can do" and the Apple fixes the loop that let it work and pushes out to OS X before the virus can even get out of the lab.

 

[defriend]

Ya..everyone has PC-(I do and I spend about 50% of the time fixing driver problems)ok maybe that is an exageration.

but the ratio from pc to macs\is approx 10 to 3. All big companies use pc. so thackers are well acostenbed to PC