FunnyMonday Fake Virus Alerts - How to remove

FunnyMonday sites (like FunnyMonday2.live, FunnyMonday40.live, FunnyMonday97.live) are scam pages that appear when an infected website or an adware virus redirects you to it. It’s not any kind of official Apple support site. Rather, FunnyMonday was created to spread Cleanup My Mac, Smart Mac Booster, and similar bogus security programs for Mac computers.

The danger with these sites is that they perform a routine trying to convince you that your Mac has a virus (Tapsnake, Bankworm, e.tre456_worm-osx, etc.). At the end of the routine, FunnyMonday offers you a program that’s supposed to remove these viruses. The programs also scan your Mac, find lots of “problems”, but won’t remove them for free. This way, malware makers make money by tricking people into paying for their useless and even malicious programs.

FunnyMonday is a scam site that should be ignored when you see it:

Type of threat	Scam Scareware
FunnyMonday distribution	Infected websites Adware viruses Malicious ads
Harm of falling for the scam	Money paid for a useless program Stress experienced when dealing with a nonexistent virus
Avoiding FunnyMonday ads	Update important software Block malicious websites Don’t go to infected websites Remove adware (Combo Cleaner) Ignore FunnyMonday warnings and close the tab

FunnyMonday alerts are fake

These fake virus detections that appear on FunnyMonday and other malicious websites are somewhat common and they’re easy to recognize when you notice them:

• FunnyMonday’s fake alert first claims that a website you visited earlier as given you a virus. Generally, real antivirus scans have no idea where your malware came from. There’s no way to know other than speculate.
• The fake alert is usually accompanied by loud error noises, completely unlike any legitimate virus scan. Sometimes (though not with FunnyMonday) a countdown is also used – 5 minutes until “permanent damage” (nothing actually happens if you allow it to run down.
• The warning appears in your browser. This is unrealistic, especially when FunnyMonday starts pretending to scan your computer at impossible speeds. A website doesn’t have access to your files and folders!

Then, if you try to remove your nonexistent virus, FunnyMonday downloads a pkg file, possibly called something like “maccleaner.pkg”. If you scanned this file using a good-quality anti-malware tool, you would see that it’s not a safe file.

How to avoid scam sites

These sites can be difficult to avoid, as they seem to infect lots of old websites. If FunnyMonday shows up consistently when you try to visit a specific address, there’s not much you can do about that, besides quitting visits to that site.

You could use an ad-blocker, or maybe an antivirus program with some real-time protection features. Such tools document malicious websites and block them. Some browsers also try to block sites that are known to be bad, and though they often fail, it’s still worth making sure that your browser is always updated and the security settings are set to blocking pop-ups and showing warnings.

Then there is the chance that an adware virus is manipulating your browser to show these warnings. And there’s almost no doubt about infection if a pop-up in your Mac OS’s UI opened a FunnyMonday page. Some malicious programs hide in your system and are configured to display a pop-up in certain conditions and open a specific page, it’s possible that no other symptoms are showing. Getting rid of all adware would help avoid sites like FunnyMonday, though they’d still exist and be accessible. Still, a program with security features, like Combo Cleaner, would be useful in avoiding infections in your Mac.

At the end of the day, FunnyMonday and its clone sites will continue to exist in some form and the best thing to do if you encounter one is to ignore it. Use shortcuts like Cmd+W to close suspicious browser tabs without having to interact with them and do not reveal your personal information to any scam sites.

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