Antivirus-click Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Antivirus-click pop-up alerts may show up unexpectedly, covering the subject of the page you explored or opening your browser when you do not need it to be opened.

Clicking the Antivirus-click advertisement can result in the injection of other malware or unwanted programs. In this post, you will see the guide of Antivirus-click popups removal in multiple ways, as well as checking your personal computer for extra viruses presence.

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What are Antivirus-click pop-ups?

Antivirus-click popups are an effect of adware action. Adware is a kind of malware that presents you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click promotions, which generates a major amount of earnings for adware representatives. These ads might include sometimes shocking information, or have a link to malevolent content/website, due to the fact that adware maintainers have no reason to examine the goodness of the web content they are going to show – their solitary target is money.

Antivirus-click push notification

Antivirus-click push notification.

Pop-up advertising itself is a very good, cheap and also very successful marketing solution1. It enables the seller to link the customers’ attention to their website, as well as the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they want to purchase. When the customer will get a pop-up alert that the TV set he likes to buy is available at the online store he/she checked out earlier with a 15% price cut, one will undoubtedly use this chance and purchase it. Taking into consideration the exceptionally low price for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising and marketing instrument is a much-loved thing among the advertising departments of big internet retailers.

Nonetheless, such a rewarding system could not be missed by virus developers. Option to show the popup ads by force to the people of malware attack is a perfect basis for malicious tricks with the popup ads. And Antivirus-click.com ads is one of hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a short summary for the Antivirus-click site
SiteAntivirus-click.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
Infection TypeAdware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address172.67.173.245
SymptomsAnnoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behaviorIssuenevercome, Updatefreeintenselytheproduct, Initiateintenselystrongtheproduct
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Antivirus-click virus?

There are a number of methods of becoming contaminated by the adware that lead to the Antivirus-click popups tornado. A lion’s part of this computer virus instances is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Free software may likewise be downloaded from the official site, and the adware is delivered as a legit bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A lot of users often work with the uncertain programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, different tools that are free, or perhaps hacked programs. All of these kinds of applications are risky, due to the fact that it is extremely easy to include a Antivirus-click malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

Antivirus-click popup malware may also be hidden in the promotion somewhere on the strange web page. Such web pages are in most cases full of intense and blinking ads, and their owners usually accept any type of promos to be placed on their page. For this reason, clicking such banners is a shot in the dark: only the advertisement provider realizes what will occur when you press this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you can likewise receive something far more damaging, like ransomware or coin miner; the substantial share of coin miners distribution is exactly after the malicious advertisements.

People dislike popups

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

Potentially undesirable applications, like Antivirus-click pop-up virus may initiate a wide range of different problems on your personal computer. Distracting is not the single effect – pop-ups may display you the advertisements, where you are offered to get one more unknown program, or “a perfect anti-malware tool”. Scareware is usually distributed with the last motto. Potentially unwanted applications, in turn, can have spyware functions. And it is quite hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a normal one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related advertisements are also exploited as a spreading method by different trojan viruses, for example – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such viruses is 100% unwanted, and can cost you hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not interacting with these banners, they may be clicked by whoever who also uses your computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation may become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without data loss. It is recommended to get rid of the viruses with anti-malware programs as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Antivirus-click pop-up advertisements?

The tutorial of Antivirus-click adware removal consists of 2 parts. Initially, we need to deal with the malware, and after that correct the effects of its action. The removal process is really easy, since it may be performed even with making use of Microsoft Defender – anti-malware tool that is present on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, because of its huge resources utilization, along with some defects that can be crucial for some groups of users, Defender is often disabled by the users, so its use is probably impossible. Additionally, various trojan viruses are capable to turn off the embedded antivirus. It is much better to make use of the separated program that will not have such exposures.

I would certainly advise you to use Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven security device that will surely wipe out the viruses from your system and also create an impenetrable shield with a Proactive protection feature. But let’s handle Antivirus-click adware initially.

Removing Antivirus-click 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 Antivirus-click 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 browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your web browser will be connected the accurate 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 text3:

# 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.

Nonetheless, there is one trouble that makes the things much harder to repair, particularly without the anti-malware program. Most of adware variants that are used to show you the Antivirus-click pop-up advertisements are changing the deep browser settings, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to fix your browser settings after your computer was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will crash soon. In certain cases, you will see no crash, however, large lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 seconds, and afterwards it will be back to the typical, until you attempt to open settings once again.

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 Antivirus-click Pop-ups?

Name: Antivirus-click

Description: Antivirus-click - 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 Antivirus-click.com push notifications?” or “why do Antivirus-click.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Antivirus-click 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 ads on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware overview and also 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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