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All web-based malware alerts are fakes. Microsoft actually does have an ongoing conversation with your PC (via telemetry) regarding updates, system errors, malware issues, and so forth – but it never responds with a warning in your web browser. Any legitimate alert from your AV app, or from your OS, will always appear in either a notification area pop-up, or in an independent window (outside of your browser window) – never as a pop-up in your web browser. So whenever you see one of these security alerts pop up in your browser, it always means that somebody out there is looking to scam you, and that they’re using this fake alert just to lure you into calling their “tech support” number.
If you do call the number, they’ll just try to scam you out of some money by selling you some worthless software or services for an exorbitant price, and maybe by stealing your personal information. If you refuse to pay up, there’s also a chance that they might punish you by installing some malware or by locking you out of your computer. These Tech Support Scam pop-up messages (dialogs) come in lots of familiar themes: virus detections; hacker alerts; firewall intrusions; hardware error reports; system error reports; and what have you – but all of these web-based warnings are fakes, and you just have to ignore the content and close the page.
And of course closing the malicious page is usually the problem, because most of these scam sites try to coerce you into calling their “tech support” number by preventing you from closing their webpage. They do that with a dialog loop, which is just a script that reloads the fake pop-up alert (dialog) every time you try to close it. So in order to escape from one of these malicious pages, the first thing that you have to do is try to close the alert. That allows the browser to detect the message loop – and the browser will then immediately respond by adding a Dialog Loop Protection checkbox (e.g., “Don’t let this page create more messages”) to the fake alert popup. And then once you’ve checked that option, you should be able to close the scam page right along with its popup:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/protect/forum/protect_defender-protect_scanning/microsoft-virus/5335f80f-4cfc-49e0-bbcf-8f575730779a?auth=1
On browsers that don’t support Dialog Loop Protection, though, you’ll still have to close the browser window with Task Manager (right-click on the taskbar; start Task Manager; and then end the browser process) and then go directly to your home page when you reopen the browser.
There’s also a newer version of the Tech Support Scam that shifts the scam page to full screen in order to hide your desktop and taskbar. With this one, you should be able to toggle the screen with the browser screen control keys; for example, I can toggle Edge’s full screen on and off with Windows logo + Shift + Enter. But since the screen control keys aren’t very well known, what I would recommend for this would be the old familiar Ctrl + Alt + Delete. That allows you to start Task Manager – where you can just close the browser app. In fact, if you start Task Manager this way with Edge in full screen, this will automatically minimize Edge, and that leaves the desktop wide open. So there are several different ways to get out of one of these full screen scams – provided, of course, that there isn’t any real malware running in the background that could interfere.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/threats/support-scams
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0346-tech-support-scams
GreginMich