Remove Audience-info.xyz Pop-up Ads — How to Fix Gude

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Audience-info.xyz pop-up notifications may show up unexpectedly, covering the content of the website you explored or opening your browser when you do not need it to be opened.

Clicking on the Audience-info.xyz promotion can cause the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the manual of Audience-info.xyz popups removal in various methods, as well as checking your personal computer for other malware presence.

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What are Audience-info.xyz pop-ups?

Audience-info.xyz popups are an effect of adware action. Adware is a sort of malware that presents you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which creates a massive amount of earnings for adware representatives. These advertisements may consist of sometimes shocking material, or have a link to malicious content/website, because adware maintainers have no reason to inspect the goodness of the material they are going to show – their single target is cash.

Audience-info.xyz push notification

Audience-info.xyz push notification.

Pop-up advertising itself is an excellent, affordable and very successful advertising instrument1. It permits the vendor to attach the buyers’ interest to their site, and the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they wish to purchase. When the consumer will get a pop-up notification that the TV set he likes to purchase is offered at the online shop he/she visited earlier with a 15% price cut, one will surely use this opportunity and purchase it. Taking into consideration the exceptionally low price for the popups and their targeting, such a promotion and marketing instrument is a favourite thing amongst the marketing teams of big online sellers.

However, such a successful plan could not be missed by malware developers. Potential to demonstrate the popup ads by force to the victims of malware attack is a great basis for malicious adjustments with the popup ads. And Audience-info.xyz advertisements is among hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a info for the Audience-info.xyz site
SiteAudience-info.xyz
HostingAS24940 Hetzner Online GmbH
Germany, Köln
Infection TypeAdware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address116.202.184.109
SymptomsAnnoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behaviorDating, Advtpr, Whampamp
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Audience-info.xyz virus?

There are a number of ways of getting infected by the adware that create the Audience-info.xyz popups storm. A lion’s part of this computer virus cases is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Free software may likewise be downloaded from the official site, and the adware is supplied as a legit bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A lot of users oftentimes use the unreliable programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, various apps that are free of cost, or perhaps hacked programs. Every one of these sorts of software are dangerous, because it is quite simple to include a Audience-info.xyz 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.

Audience-info.xyz popup malware can also be concealed in the advertisement somewhere on the unusual web page. Such sites are in most cases full of bright and blinking ads, and their owners generally approve any promotions to be posted on their web page. Hence, clicking such banners is a shot in the dark: only the advertisement contractor knows what will occur when you click this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you can also get something a lot more threatening, like ransomware or coin miner; the large share of coin miners distribution is exactly after the malicious promotions.

People dislike popups

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

Potentially undesirable programs, like Audience-info.xyz popup virus may initiate a variety of troubles on your PC. Distracting is not the only effect – pop-up notifications can present you the promotions, where you are offered to download one more strange program, or “a perfect security tool”. Scareware is often distributed under the last slogun. Potentially undesirable applications, in turn, may have spyware functionality. And it is very hard to distinguish the undesirable app from a normal one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related ads are also exploited as a distribution method by various trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such viruses is 100% unwanted, and can cost you several hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not interacting with these advertisements, they may be clicked by someone who also uses your computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the things may become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without data and money loss. It is recommended to eliminate the viruses with anti-malware applications as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Audience-info.xyz pop-up advertisements?

The manual of Audience-info.xyz adware elimination consists of 2 parts. Initially, we need to exterminate the malware, and afterwards fix the effects of its action. The elimination task is pretty easy, because it can be executed even with making use of Microsoft Defender – security software that is available on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. Nonetheless, as a result of its large resources usage, as well as some failures that can be crucial for some categories of users, Defender is oftentimes disabled by the users, so its use is likely impossible. Furthermore, a wide range of trojan viruses are able to disable the embedded antivirus. It is better to make use of the separated program that will not have such weakness.

I’d recommend you to use Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven security tool that will undoubtedly erase the malware from your system and also create an invulnerable cover with a Proactive protection function. But let’s deal with Audience-info.xyz adware first.

Removing Audience-info.xyz 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 Audience-info.xyz 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 make sure that your browser will connect the appropriate DNS while connecting to the site you want. Make a text file named “hosts” on your computer’s desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following lines3:

# 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.

However, there is one trouble that makes things a lot more difficult to repair, particularly without the anti-malware software. The majority of adware variations that are used to show you the Audience-info.xyz pop-up ads are altering the deep browser settings, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to change your browser settings after your PC was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly crash soon. Sometimes, you will see no crash, however, large lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 seconds, and afterwards it will be back to the normal, till 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 Audience-info.xyz Pop-ups?

Name: Audience-info.xyz

Description: Audience-info.xyz - 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 Audience-info.xyz push notifications?” or “why do Audience-info.xyz pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Audience-info.xyz 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 review and also the reasons why I advise it for malware elimination.
  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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