Browse-boost Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Browse-boost pop-up notifications appear when you do not expect, distracting and annoying you. However, that is much more than annoying pop-ups – their essence is clearly malignant, and they can introduce other malicious stuff to your device. In this post, I will show you how to remove Browse-boost pop-up notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Browse-boost pop-ups will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the sites it can open may introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups can also promote fake online shopping sites which will take your money and payment info. The latter generally ends up with losing all the money you have on the exposed card.

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What are Browse-boost pop-up advertisements?

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 pop-ups and Browse-boost pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal push notifications are offered for you to enable with a straightforward purpose – notify you about the latest posts, goods for sale and so on. It is an effective approach to help your site to keep visitors and help the interested users to have the best deal.

Brief description of the Browse-boost.com pop-ups:
NameBrowse-boost.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address104.21.51.163
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorNews, Ourcommonwords, Qasforsalesrepr
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Browse-boost pop-up notifications, on the other hand, are related to less legit sites. You will commonly observe the offer to enable them following the redirection from another page. It’s OK to see redirects unless it throws you to such a questionable place. In this case, turning on pop-up notifications is offered as the anti-DDoS check-up. Alternatively, the sites can deny showing you the contents unless you apply these pop-ups. These theses should be the red flag, as sites generally feature a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing such an demand is a reason to skip the site right away. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not see the website – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up notifications.

Browse-boost push notification

Browse-boost push notification.

How does this work?

Most of web browsers support turning on pop-ups from sites. Websites, on the other hand, can send out notifications with the content they like. It may be an advertisement of the product posted on this site, as well as an ad of their partner page. As a result, you can see the push notification from site X, but clicking it will direct you to site Y – because a referral link to the latter was added.

Scoundrels bear on this ability in their attempt to earn money using illegal advertising. They trick users into allowing the pop-ups, and then just spread numerous banners of other crooks they contract with. As you can suppose, no legit companies will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Browse-boost push ads you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same victim can be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming websites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The ads these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It generally provides a negligible commission for one view, but when you have hundreds of victims and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a way bigger sum. Even though most of such ads are ineffective, it can still bring all the parties a lot of profit.

Are Browse-boost pop-up ads dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they may look non-threatening – just a blinking pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the things this window promotes differ sharply from what you used to see in pop-ups. Browse-boost.com website is controlled by fraudsters, who deliberately throw tons of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any common sense and can launch sporadic pop-up advertisements into a storm of banners. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all troubles these push notifications carry.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing related to illegal advertising, Browse-boost pop-ups lack legit offers. Even when crooks make the ads similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the web page these banners 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 ads 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, Browse-boost pop-up ads are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Browse-boost pop-ups?

Fortunately, Browse-boost push notifications removal is pretty easy. They reside in the browser and cannot hide themselves among system files. However, as I told above, some pop-up ads can deliver malicious programs to your system. It is nearly impossible to show all of the cases, and manual malware removal is inconvenient. Therefore, after removing the source of the pop-ups the best option is to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that if you have never allowed pop-up advertisements, but they still appeared. That can be a sign of malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both system recovery and malware scanning purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and advanced detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in manual or automated way. The former, obviously, takes more time to complete and may 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 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 options for each browser. By default, they are set up in a manner that 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 the latter is also able to reset the HOSTS file without any additional commands.

Reset your browsers manually

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


# 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.

Scan your system for possible viruses

After removing the Browse-boost push notifications, it’s time to see if these pop-ups brought any threat to your system. Launch GridinSoft Anti-Malware, and then click on Standard scan. It will be enough in most cases to find and remove malware. The scan will last 5-10 minutes; you are free to use your system during that process.

GridinSoft Anti-Malware during the scan process

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).

GridinSoft scan finished

How to Remove Browse-boost Pop-ups?

Name: Browse-boost

Description: Browse-boost - 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 Browse-boost.com push notifications?” or “why do Browse-boost.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Browse-boost 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 this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
  2. 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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