McAfee Popup Scam

The so-called "McAfee popup" scam is a simple but effective scam that can show up online and attempts to phish user credentials.

The scam is very simple in its design. The user lands on an untrustworthy page, usually after following a rogue link or ad from a different page, and is presented with a pop-up box that claims the system's "protection from viruses has expired".

To lend at least a passing air of fake legitimacy to this claim, the pages that display the scam popup make illegal use of the real McAfee branding and logo imagery. Of course, the scam popup and page have nothing to do with the legitimate McAfee company or their products.

The victims are expected to click the "Get protection" button, which will redirect them to a phishing portal, set up to harvest logins and credentials, as well as any other personal information the scam operators might decide to include in the fillable forms.

If you run into similar scams, just remember that a random website can never know the status of your system when it comes to virus protection or lack thereof. Close any similar scary messages and navigate away from the pages to avoid exposing your system to further trouble or risking your information being stolen.