AntiFreeVirus Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

AntiFreeVirus pop-up notifications appear when you do not expect, detracting and annoying you. Still, they are much more than simple pop-ups – their essence is surely malicious, and they may introduce other malware to your system. In this post, I will show you the guide how to remove AntiFreeVirus push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

What are AntiFreeVirus pop-ups?

As the pop-up definition goes, these are short and small advertisements that attract your attention to a product they promote. But the difference between regular push notifications and AntiFreeVirus pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal pop-up notifications are offered for you to enable with a understandable purpose – keep you aware about the fresh publications, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful thing to help your site to keep visitors and help the interested ones to have the best deal.

Brief summary of the Antifreevirus.info pop-ups:

AntiFreeVirus pop-up advertisements, on the other hand, are related to untrustworthy web pages. You will generally witness the offer to enable them after a redirection from another page. It’s OK to see redirects unless they throw you to such a questionable place. At that point, enabling pop-ups is offered under the guise of the anti-bot check-up. Alternatively, the websites may deny showing you the content unless you enable these pop-up notifications. These demands should already be the red flag, as websites commonly have a different anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing this demand is a reason to skip the site right away. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the website – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up advertisements.

How does this work?

Most of browsers support turning on push notifications from sites. Sites, on the other hand, can send out notifications with the content of their choice. It can be an advertisement of the product or a page posted on this website, or an ad of their partner page. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but clicking it will direct you to website Y – because a referral link to the latter was built in.

The promotions these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a negligible payment for one person, but when you have hundreds of users and make it hundreds of times every day – that is a way bigger sum. Even though the majority of such banners giving no result at all, it may still bring all the participants a lot of profit.

Are AntiFreeVirus pop-ups dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look safe – just a blinking pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you generally see in pop-up notifications. Antifreevirus.info site is controlled by crooks, who intentionally throw hundreds and thousands of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any manners of advertising and can make sporadic push notifications into a hurricane of promotions. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But troubles are not over at this point.

As any other thing related to illegal advertising, AntiFreeVirus pop-up advertisements lack legit offers. Even though crooks make the banners looking similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the website these ads will throw you to are completely different. And these pages can offer you to turn on other pop-ups, install a “useful” program, or pay for a thing at a big discount and never receive it. Let’s leave aside the cases when pop-up advertisements promote phishing pages or straightforward malware. There’s no way these pages will bring you any good, thus interacting with them is a very bad idea. For the same reason, AntiFreeVirus pop-up advertisements are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove AntiFreeVirus pop-ups?

Initially, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in manual or automated way. The former, obviously, requires more time to complete and can be somewhat complicated if you have never done that. Automated supposes the use of anti-malware programs that can reset all browser settings at once.

Reset your browsers manually

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. 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. In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:

After choosing this option, you will see the next message:

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 browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your browser will connect the right DNS while connecting to the site you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following lines²:

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.

Scan your system for possible viruses

Once the scan is complete, you will see the detections or a notification about a clean system. Proceed with pressing the Clean Up button (or OK when nothing is detected).

1. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.