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Avast Antivirus shows malware-looking popup to win a MacBook Air

Avast! antivirus has already managed to anger some of its users in the wee hours this morning. The culprit? They sent a popup notification to Avast! users through the program informing them of their chances to “Win a MacBook Air!”, a contest Avast! is legitimately putting on to promote their Avast! free antivirus for Mac being now available.


(photo credit: @Grisha)

A thread on the Avast! forums was started this morning to register a few dislikes. Many more people also took to Twitter to express their dislike or their new intent to switch antivirus software after receiving the popup.

I have to agree somewhat with the vocal minority. The popup looks exactly like bad ads and a MacBook Air is a common award used in spam messages. I had to do a double-take when it slid up this morning to see that it was from Avast!. That’s also the reason I failed to take a screenshot of it and the picture above is not in English.

You should be able to prevent yourself from receiving this type of popup messages under the Avast Settings. If you switch to the Community tab, you can uncheck all of the settings here to prevent such popups in the future.