Pop up messages that my laptop is infected

BruceR said:

Firefox is no different in this respect

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I also have firefox set to block all requests.

TairikuOkami said:

That is the reason it is called scareware, it does literally nothing, but it scares people into doing something bad and stupid!

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Exactly we see so many posts from the windows notification center coming from browsers, the computer is almost never infected, its always just needs to be turned off in the notification center which is so easy to do. Despite what the notification looks like, it will always have the application name as seen here. Notice the "via microsoft edge." Click the three dots next to the x and turn them off. If you want notifications from your browser, go the web browsers settings and remove any websites you do not recognize listed there.

At least the current crop of scareware doesn't come with drive-by downloads. Maybe turn off notifications. They're just another way in for some hacker to exploit.

kelper said:

Which anti virus / anti malware program are you using? Or are you relying on Windows Security or Windows Defender (two names for the same thing really).

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Despite the assurances of the purists, I never rely on anything Microsoft, I much prefer the Russians </sarcasm mode OFF>. To that end, I have Kaspersky Premium anti-malware, as well as UBlock Origin, AdGuard Adblocker and Duckduckgo Search and Tracker Prevention plugins/addons installed on all my browsers (Brave, Opera, Firefox, Chrome ... oh yeh, and I suppose that other one that came with Windows)

I have found MS anti-virus to be effective and reliable. I still use Kaspersky Premium with my work stations. The last time any PCs on the home front got hit with a virus it was a zero day and it was actually on one of my daughter's computers. About a week later a virus definition was found for it but by that time the damage was done and I had to write over quite a number of files for her just to get the OS to restore itself well enough to rescue her personal files and folders. Not even Kaspersky could have prevented this. I did manage to isolate the virus in a hidden file but after getting it to show itself it rendered all the files in that folder completely untouchable. After rescuing the rest of her files I simply wiped that drive and replaced it with a new hard drive and a fresh copy of Windows 8.1. That was some time ago and she no longer uses that OS. ironically, she still uses Win 7 Pro because of some of the games she plays will only work on Win 7. Internet on that OS is disabled.