Remove Alerts-defenses Pop-up Ads — How to Fix Gude

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Alerts-defenses pop-up alerts may show up unexpectedly, covering the post of the website you went to or opening your browser when you do not wish it to be opened.

Clicking on the Alerts-defenses promotion may trigger the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this post, you will see the tutorial of Alerts-defenses popups removal in multiple ways, as well as inspecting your PC for other viruses existence.

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What are Alerts-defenses pop-ups?

Alerts-defenses popups are a consequence of adware activity. Adware is a type of malware that shows you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click advertisements, which generates a massive amount of profit for adware suppliers. These promotions may consist of explicit composition, or have a link to malevolent content/website, considering that adware maintainers have no purpose to check the goodness of the web content they are going to reveal – their single target is money.

Alerts-defenses push notification

Alerts-defenses push notification.

Pop-up promotions itself is a good, affordable and very productive marketing instrument1. It allows the vendor to link the customers’ attention to their site, as well as the buyers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they wish to buy. When the consumer will get a pop-up alert that the TV set he desires to buy is available at the online store he/she checked out previously with a 15% price cut, one will undoubtedly use this possibility and get it. Considering the extremely low price for the popups and their targeting, such a promotion and marketing tool is a much-loved thing amidst the advertising teams of huge online stores.

Nevertheless, such a rewarding strategy could not be missed by virus creators. Ability to demonstrate the popup advertisements forcibly to the victims of malware attack is a perfect basis for malevolent tricks with the popup advertisements. And Alerts-defenses.com advertisements is among hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a summary for the Alerts-defenses
Site Alerts-defenses.com
Hosting AS25575 Ledl.net GmbH
Austria, Vienna
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 213.145.228.113
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior Causerton, Defimedia, Downloadmyfilenow
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Alerts-defenses virus?

There are a lot of ways of becoming infected by the adware that trigger the Alerts-defenses popups storm. A lion’s part of this computer virus incidents is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Freeware may additionally be downloaded from the official website, and the adware is supplied as a legitimate bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A number of users frequently work with the dubious programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, different apps that are free of cost, or perhaps hacked programs. All of these types of programs are dangerous, because it is quite easy to build in a Alerts-defenses malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

Alerts-defenses popup virus may additionally be concealed in the advertisement somewhere on the unusual website. Such web pages are typically packed with intense and blinking ads, and their owners often permit any type of promos to be published on their web page. For this reason, clicking such banners is a risky thing: only the ad provider realizes what will occur when you click this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or unwanted programs, you may likewise get something a lot more damaging, like ransomware or coin miner; the big share of coin miners circulation is exactly after the malicious ads.

People dislike popups

The statistic shows that people dislike popup advertising more than other types of promotions

Potentially undesirable applications, like Alerts-defenses popup virus can provoke a lot of problems on your computer. Distracting is not the single effect – pop-ups can show you the banners, where you are offered to get one more dubious application, or “a perfect anti-malware tool”. Scareware is often distributed with the use of the last motto. Potentially unwanted applications, in turn, can have spyware functionality. And it is quite hard to distinguish the undesirable app from a legit one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related ads are also used as a spreading method by various trojan viruses, for example – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such viruses is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you several hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not clicking these promotions, they can be clicked by whoever who also makes use of your PC – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without information loss. It is recommended to remove the viruses with anti-malware applications as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Alerts-defenses pop-up advertisements?

The manual of Alerts-defenses adware elimination consists of 2 parts. First, we need to eliminate the malware, and after that correct the consequences of its activity. The removal process is very easy, because it can be executed even with using Microsoft Defender – security software that is present on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nonetheless, due to its substantial resources utilization, as well as some bugs that may be critical for some kinds of users, Defender is oftentimes disabled by the users, so its utilization is most likely impossible. Additionally, different trojan viruses can turn off the embedded antivirus. It is much better to make use of the separated program that will not have such exposures.

I’d suggest you to use Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven security device that will definitely erase the malware from your system and also make an impenetrable shield with a Proactive protection feature. However, let’s take care of Alerts-defenses adware first.

Removing Alerts-defenses popup virus with GridinSoft Anti-Malware

  • Download and install GridinSoft Anti-Malware. After the installation, you will be offered to perform the Standard Scan. Approve this action.
  • Gridinsoft Anti-Malware during the scan process

  • Standard scan checks the logical disk where the system files are stored, together with the files of programs you have already installed. The scan lasts up to 6 minutes.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware scan results

  • When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Alerts-defenses malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware - After Cleaning

Now, when the computer is clean of viruses, we can proceed to the browser reset. You can do this step manually, as well as with the use of GridinSoft Anti-Malware.

Reset browser settings to default

Manual method of browser reset

To reset Edge, do the following steps :
  1. Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option :
  2. Reseting the Edge browser

  3. After picking the Reset Settings option, you will see the following menu, stating about the settings which will be reverted to original :
For Mozilla Firefox, do the next actions :
  1. Open Menu tab (three strips in upper right corner) and click the “Help” button. In the appeared menu choose “troubleshooting information” :
  2. The first step to revert Mozilla Firefox

  3. In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option :
  4. The second step of Firefox restoration
    After choosing this option, you will see the next message :
    The last step for Firefox
If you use Google Chrome
  1. Open Settings tab, find the “Advanced” button. In the extended tab choose the “Reset and clean up” button :
  2. In the appeared list, click on the “Restore settings to their original defaults” :
  3. Finally, you will see the window, where you can see all the settings which will be reset to default :
Opera can be reset in the next way
  1. Open Settings menu by pressing the gear icon in the toolbar (left side of the browser window), then click “Advanced” option, and choose “Browser” button in the drop-down list. Scroll down, to the bottom of the settings menu. Find there “Restore settings to their original defaults” option :

  2. After clicking the “Restore settings…” button, you will see the window, where all settings, which will be reset, are shown :

When the web browsers are reset, you need to make sure that your web browser will definitely be connected the proper DNS while connecting to the web page you need. Create a text file named “hosts” on your desktop, then open it and fill it with the following content3:

# Copyright (c) 1993-2006 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a ‘#’ symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host
# localhost name resolution is handle within DNS itself.
# 127.0.0.1 localhost
# ::1 localhost

Find the hosts.txt file in C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc directory. Rename this file to “hosts.old.txt” (to distinguish it from the new one), and then move the file you created on the desktop to this folder. Remove the hosts.old from this folder. Now you have your hosts file as good as new.

Nevertheless, there is one problem that makes the things much harder to fix, specifically without the anti-malware program. Most of adware variants that are utilized to show you the Alerts-defenses pop-up advertisements are changing the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to change your browser settings after your machine was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will crash quickly. In certain cases, you will see no crash, however, huge lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 secs, and after that it will be back to the typical, up until you try to open settings once more.

Reset your browser settings with GridinSoft Anti-Malware

To reset your browser with GridinSoft Anti-Malware, open the Tools tab, and click the “Reset browser settings” button.

Tools tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

You can see the list of the options for each browser. By default, they are set up in the manner which fits the majority of users. Press the “Reset” button (lower right corner). In a minute your browser will be as good as new.

Reset Browser Settings tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

The browser reset is recommended to perform through the antivirus tool by GridinSoft, because last is also able to reset the HOSTS file without any additional commands.

How to Remove Alerts-defenses Pop-ups?

Name: Alerts-defenses

Description: Alerts-defenses - a lot of users became a target for the pop-up advertisements. I have a lot of friends who literally bombed me with the questions like “how to remove Alerts-defenses.com push notifications?” or “why do Alerts-defenses.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Alerts-defenses pop-ups, which may corrupt your browser’s correct performance, and create a lot of troubles while you are working.

Operating System: Windows

Application Category: Adware

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References

  1. More about pop-up advertisements on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware review and the reasons why I advise it for malware removal.
  3. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.

About the author

Wilbur Woodham

I was a technical writer from early in my career, and consider IT Security one of my foundational skills. I’m sharing my experience here, and I hope you find it useful.

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