Pop-ups Abound

[jcrowdad]

Suddenly there a pop-ups everywhere despite the fact that Real-Time Protection (both Malware Protection and App Block) is turned on. Malwarebytes is no longer present on search windows. 

Any suggestions?

 

[alvarnell]

Pop ups are rarely caused by malware on your Mac, rather they usually come from JavaScript embedded in the site you visited. If you can attach a screenshot, we can probably tell you more, but there’s an excellent chance there is nothing actually installed on your computer for Malwarebytes to detect.

[exile360]

Greetings,

In addition to the information above from alvarnell which is quite accurate, I would also suggest checking your notification settings in your browser as it is quite possible that one or more sites is abusing the push notifications function available in Chrome.  You can learn more about malicious push notifications in this Malwarebytes Labs blog article as well as this Malwarebytes Labs blog article.

I hope this helps, and if the issues still persist please let us know and we will provide further assistance.

Thanks

[jcrowdad]

Thanks for your suggestions. It appears that as of a few days ago Safari 13 no longer supports browser extensions, rendering most ad blockers ineffective. So even though Malwarebytes' Real-Time Protection is "on," it is not blocking ads as it did previously. I opened a case twice with customer service but in a week have not received a response. Also, whenever I tried to engage Chat, even in the middle of the day, a message appeared that Chat was not available.

After researching the matter, I decided to download AdGuard on a trial basis. Supposedly this app doesn't rely on browser extensions in the same way. The pop-ups have completely stopped for now. 

I would be interested to know if there are other practical, easy solutions. I suppose that there are other apps from Mac AppStore that would work as well.

Aside from the elimination of browser extensions, Safari 13 does have a number of quirks and inconveniences that still require me to use a different browser from time to time. Apple needs to fix these issues.

[alvarnell]

46 minutes ago, jcrowdad said:

So even though Malwarebytes' Real-Time Protection is "on," it is not blocking ads as it did previously.

Malwarebytes Real-Time Protection for Mac never did block ads, only applications.

And it's technically not true that Safari 13 no longer supports browser extensions, rather the extension must now be placed in an Application in order to be used by Safari. As you have found, there are a few developers that have now converted to this approach and there will probably be more as time goes on. 

I do have had AdGuard installed for a couple of weeks now, but there do seem to be some issues that the developer is working, so may not be best approach. uBlock Origin developer and others who have tried say they can't make it work with Apple's new rules. Ka-Block was one of the first to convert and does not need to read or transmit content from any webpages.

[Massimiliano]

4 hours ago, jcrowdad said:

I suppose that there are other apps from Mac AppStore that would work as well.

3 hours ago, alvarnell said:

Ka-Block was one of the first to convert and does not need to read or transmit content from any webpages.

I use Ka-Block!  since about 1 year and a half and I've never had any problems not even with Catalina Beta, not to mention the fact that it has no privileges on web pages as Al told: in one word FANTASTIC.

[treed]

On 9/28/2019 at 8:39 PM, jcrowdad said:

Thanks for your suggestions. It appears that as of a few days ago Safari 13 no longer supports browser extensions, rendering most ad blockers ineffective. So even though Malwarebytes' Real-Time Protection is "on," it is not blocking ads as it did previously.

As Al pointed out, Malwarebytes for Mac never has done ad blocking, and it has never had a Safari extension. You mentioned that "Malwarebytes is no longer present on search windows," but I don't know what that means, as Malwarebytes should not show up in any way on your search windows in Safari (unless you're searching for something Malwarebytes-related and it shows up in the search results).

Another alternative to Ka-Block that should work on Catalina is 1Blocker. It's a bit pricey compared to other ad blockers, but IMO is worth the cost.

[jcrowdad]

Thanks for your clarifications and suggestions. 

If I am not mistaken, soon after installation a Malwarebytes logo would appear at the top of a search page, to the left of the address bar. By clicking the logo, the number of applications that were tracking and were blocked at that particular site was disclosed. That feature disappeared some months back.

I certainly will check out Ka-Block! and 1Blocker. A number of reviewers of Ka-Block! claimed that they could not uninstall it or that it simply did not block ads. But most of those reviews were written more than a year ago and probably did not refer to the newer Mac operating systems and Safari 13. 

[Massimiliano]

That M logo you are talking about appears if you use Malwarebytes Browser Guard on Firefox & Chrome and not on Safari or at least not yet.

[treed]

8 hours ago, jcrowdad said:

If I am not mistaken, soon after installation a Malwarebytes logo would appear at the top of a search page, to the left of the address bar. By clicking the logo, the number of applications that were tracking and were blocked at that particular site was disclosed. That feature disappeared some months back.

That has never been a feature of Malwarebytes for Mac, and our free browser extension (now called Browser Guard) has never yet been available for Safari. If you were running something in Safari that was using a Malwarebytes logo, I'd be very interested in finding out what that was.

[jcrowdad]

The M logo could have appeared on Chrome or Firefox.