McAfee virus warning

[JoeyB1]

Since updating to 5.42753.47 I ma now getting a McAfee warning "Virus Found", "pc at risk", McAfee pc at risk" and similar popup warnings in my Vivaldi notification popup.
I do not have McAffe installed on my computer. I use AVG/Avast.
I checked my programs, did a computer search, no McAfee is found.
One warning I received was "forsts.com", again searched and not in my computer. google search said it is a scam fake McAfee. They suggested deleting the cookie, I did, and remove it from my browser.
I can't find it in Vivaldi, and I don't know how.

Also, now I am getting a large grey broken link on a site I have been going to for years. It covers the comments section only, see attached. If I reload the page it clears.

I did not have these issues ever before the latest update.
Please advise.

[DoctorG]

@JoeyB1 Some sites install a notification handler and spam you in Window Notification Center.
Delete them.
Open vivaldi://serviceworker-internals , check for strange websites and unregister these workers.

The "Dead Bird" tab happen when a tab crashes, caused by extensions, some websites, security tools or broken interaction with graphics drivers.

Please check Troubleshooting issues.

PS: We have some issue reports for such crashes. The devs are investigating.

[Pathduck]

@JoeyB1 Hi, these are most likely two different issues.

Spam/scam notifications are caused by users accidentally allowing notifications from malicious web sites. Sites use all kinds of tricks to trick users into allowing them.

In addition to checking the vivaldi://service-workers url, also:

• Check url: chrome://settings/content/notifications
  and delete any sites you don't recognize.
• Also (highly recommended), go to Settings > Privacy and set Notifications to Block under "Default Permissions". Should you (for some reason) need notifications from some site you can instead explicitly allow it. Stops you from accidentally allowing these scams.

The "dead canary"is caused by a crashing site. In this case most likely an embedded comments site (Disqus?). As always, it might help to know the URL of the page in question so others can check.

Go through all the troubleshooting steps as mentioned above.

[Catweazle]

@JoeyB1 , anyway it seems some kind of adware, apart of the recommended troubleshooting steps, run a scan with AdwCleaner, or better with the Panda Cloud Cleaner.

[JoeyB1]

@Pathduck Yes, it is Disqus.

[JoeyB1]

@DoctorG There were quite a few I didn't recognize, so I deleted them all. It seems to have worked.

Thank you very much.

[Hadden89]

@JoeyB1 Yeah, never click on allow notifications especially if the sites say is mandatory to see the content.
Is not, and always end with spam and potentially risky ads.
In few cases dead canaries also depends on the fact the adblocker is blocking some threats (usually scripts).
The bad site don't like that and decide to send a kill command with another script.

---

Forst also don't have a working HTTPS (a ring should bell) and now goes to a proably fake buy domain page linked to a totally different site which should make ring another bell.

[JoeyB1]

@Pathduck Upon further review I found that the 'dead canary' big grey block comes on the ARCAMAX, I believe managed by Disqus, comes on the comic pages.
It does not come up on any of the 'funnies' at all.
https://www.arcamax.com/thefunnies/1anddone/

It does come up on all of the political comics
https://www.arcamax.com/politics/editorialcartoons/afbranco/

I tried turning off the Vivaldi ad blocker and AdBlock app I installed years ago. One at a time, both off, one on, then the other, etc. It didn't help.
I think there is something in the last Vivaldi update that has somehow triggered this.
What do you think?

[Catweazle]

@JoeyB1 , I can't reproduce it, no dead bird here with all my extensions active*. In any case, to check if the reason is in an extension, it is not enough to disable it, since there may still be some resident scripts. The only way is to test it in a Vivaldi guest profile, which put it to the default settings without extensions.

• Security and privacy extensions I use
  uBlock Origin
  Privacy Badger
  Site Bleacher
  Clear Links
  Miner Block
  I don't Care about Cookies

No problem with these-

[Pathduck]

@JoeyB1 said in McAfee virus warning:

It does come up on all of the political comics
https://www.arcamax.com/politics/editorialcartoons/afbranco/

No problem showing that cartoon + Disqus comments here, in a clean profile of Vivaldi 5.4 Stable, Win10 x64, even after logging in to comment. Adblocking on/off doesn't seem to make a difference:

When disabling extensions make sure to also clear cache, close tabs and restart the browser to make sure any extension code is cleaned out.

You never posted your OS information, please go to Help > About and copy+paste the information here.

One theory might be that it's videos in the embedded Disqus page that causes the iframe to crash. There have been reports from some users on crashing on certain type of videos. But again, these should've been blocked by the adblocker anyway.

[JoeyB1]

@Pathduck Vivaldi 5.4.2753.47 (Stable channel) (64-bit)
Revision 9fb7fdb85e69a976cc6784ef2de077e88b01995d
OS Windows 10 Version 21H1 (Build 19043.1889)
JavaScript V8 10.4.132.23
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/104.0.5112.115 Safari/537.36
Command Line "C:\Users\Dennis\AppData\Local\Vivaldi\Application\vivaldi.exe" --enable-features --disable-features --flag-switches-begin --flag-switches-end --save-page-as-mhtml
Executable Path C:\Users\Dennis\AppData\Local\Vivaldi\Application\vivaldi.exe
Profile Path C:\Users\Dennis\AppData\Local\Vivaldi\User Data\Default

[Pathduck]

@JoeyB1 Well OK, that looks pretty much vanilla to me. I really have no idea what might be the cause, I was thinking maybe you were on Win7 or similar.

My guess is some kind of crash due to media ads on the Disqus embedded comments form.

Thing is, if it works fine for others, chances are if you report a bug to the tracker, it will be closed with a "cannot reproduce" status.

If you come across other pages where you get similar crashes/"dead birds" update this topic and I'll have a look, maybe easier to troubleshoot a site that does not have such complex embeds.

I guess the general troubleshooting steps were already posted above but can't hurt to post them again:
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/troubleshoot/troubleshooting-issues/

[JoeyB1]

I use the AVG browser for backup to Vivaldi. That browser had no issues through all this.

But today I changed internet service providers. No changes, and in fact I didn't even need to re-sign in on Arcamax/Disquis, or any of my other sites including banking, investments and such.
The dead bird and blockage are gone. I don't know why. I don't know how. I'm too old to figure it out! It works and I'm happy .
It is 'one-in-a-row', so if it comes back I'll let you know. In the meantime thank you so much for your help. I do appreciate it.

[JoeyB1]

@Pathduck Well, no joy. It was just one in a row, today the dead bird and grey blockage are back. This only happens on the Arcamax political comics, not on the Arcamax regular comics, and started after I last updated Vivaldi.
Also, when I click on the Vivaldi settings, I no longer get the full page but a tiny box that I have to click to get to full page. I tried to manually extend the page to full screen, but it doesn't stay in full screen.
Ideas?

[Pathduck]

@JoeyB1 said in McAfee virus warning:

today the dead bird and grey blockage are back.

No more ideas I'm afraid. Please go through all the troubleshooting steps linked earlier. And make sure the browser is updated, there was a new release yesterday.

Also, when I click on the Vivaldi settings, I no longer get the full page but a tiny box that I have to click to get to full page. I tried to manually extend the page to full screen, but it doesn't stay in full screen.
Ideas?

Hard to understand what you're talking about. By default the settings open in a window, there is a setting to make it open in a tab instead (which is much preferable IMO). Windows tend to remember their size, so if you've accidentally resized it very small it will stay that way. You'll need to resize it again like you would any other window, and then close it. It should then remember its previous size.

As always when it's difficult to explain what you're seeing on screen, a screenshot will help understand better.
https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/how-to-screenshot-on-windows