How to fix
Error Code WBACK7917 Pop-Up
on Windows

Hi.  I keep getting a pop-up on Safari, which reports a virus attack and malicious activities being held on my Mac. The error code is WBACK7917. The message contains information on what causes the virus may lead to and the instruct me to call for professional IT specialists. The number is given. I’m scared to lose personal information, but I’m not sure whether I should call for those technicians or better find the one that I’m familiar with. Please advise what I should do.

Unfortunately, but WBACK7917 is a pop-up alert, which falls under “tech-support-scam” category. Therefore, before providing the details related to this scam, we want to urge you NOT to dial the given number because the supposed “professional IT technicians” on the other side of the handset are frauds who may trick you in various ways. Nowadays technical support scam pop-ups are very common on both Windows and Mac OS. Usually, such pop-ups show up randomly and render false claims, such as virus infection due to which the computer or web browser has been locked. These scam alerts often contain malicious codes or Java scripts, which cause a web browser to freeze. Therefore, people easily fall for believing that the system has been infected and that personal data is at the risk. However, understand that pop-up notifications like WBACK7917 are fake. They are rendered by scammers who seek to make people call a tech-support numbers (commonly claiming to be an Apple support number), which may be highly-charged or belong to serious frauds who may try to gain remote access to people’s computers and then you can easily imagine what tasks would be implemented on them.

To start with, it’s important to stress the fact that WBACK7917 support scam is not caused by a virus. The reason why people see it is related to an ad-supported application that might have been installed via freeware bundle. Once installed, it drops a browser plug-in into the web browser and forces it to generate fake pop-up, such as Error Code WBACK7917. Sometimes the pop-up contains OK button or lacks it. Even though the OK button is present, clicking it will not terminate the pop-up. It will either disappear for some time or nothing will happen to leave the support scam WBACK7917 pop-up freezing the screen.

At the time of writing, WBACK7917 scam is targeting Mac OS users with Safari web browser. However, it’s still not clear whether it’s limited to Mac OS and Safari browser, so the others should beware of this scam notification as well. The pop-up source typically is httt://mac-online-security-alert(dot)com, but it may vary.  If your web browser started delivering pop-up message saying “Critical Security Warning! Your Mac is infected with a malicious virus attack”, it’s about time to perform several steps to stop this pop-up from reoccurring.

How to Fix Error Code WBACK7917 Pop-Up on Mac OS?

As we have already pointed out, WBACK7917 is a fake alert that tends to freeze web browser’s screen. According to the recent research, this particular tech-support-scam affects all versions of Safari but does not lock the screen of 9.1 version or later. It means that you will be able to access menu bar and other tabs. Therefore, if you see the fake message, click the close tab icon visible next to the scam website.

In case the WBACK7917 error pop-up reappeared, find “Don’t show more alerts from this webpage” option and mark it with a checkbox. Click OK and use Safari for a while to check if that helped.

In case you cannot close the tech-support-scam message on your Mac, try the following:

• Press Command + W in order to Safari to close.
• If WBACK7917 scam disabled some of the options on Safari’s menu, including the option to Quit it (the button are in gray), press Command ⌘ + option + esc, select Safari, and press Force Quit.
• To prevent the alert from reappearing after relaunching Safari, hold Shift button while reopening the browser. This way, the pages that were open the last time Safari was running will be closed automatically.

If these steps did not work, our recommendation would be to reset Safari by performing the following steps:

• Click Safari and find an option Reset Safari.
• In addition, you will have to remove files named something like mac online security or WBACK7917. For this purpose, start Finder and click Command ⌘ + Shift + G.
• Type  ~/Library/Preferences.
• Look for the file we have indicated above and move it to Trash.
• After that, restart your Mac.

Finally, we would recommend scanning your Mac with [rev id=”MacKeeper”] to remove malware and fully optimize the system.