Captcha.AmazingContent pop-ups appear out of the blue, distracting and irritating you. Still, they are way more than annoying pop-ups – their origins is cleanly malicious, and they may install other malware to your device. In this post, I will guide you on how to remove Captcha.AmazingContent pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.
Any interaction with Captcha.AmazingContent pop-up advertisements will be ineffective at best. In worst case scenario, the websites it can show you can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up notifications 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.
What are Captcha.AmazingContent pop-up notifications?
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 Captcha.AmazingContent pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Common pop-up notifications are offered for you to enable with a understandable purpose – keep you aware about the fresh articles, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful tool to help your website to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested users to have the best deal.
Short summary of the Captcha.amazingcontent.site pop-up ads:
Name | Captcha.amazingcontent.site |
Hosting | AS24940 Hetzner Online GmbH Germany, Lübeck |
IP Address | 176.9.80.29 |
Malware type | Adware1 |
Effect | Unwanted pop-up advertisements |
Hazard level | Medium |
Malware source | Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites |
Similar behavior | News, News, Playvideodirect |
Removal method | To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC |
Captcha.AmazingContent pop-up notifications, as opposed, are related to untrustworthy websites. You will generally observe the proposition to enable them after a redirection from another page. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless they throw you into such a questionable place. At that point, turning on pop-up ads is offered under the guise of the anti-DDoS filtering. In other cases, the web pages can refuse to show you the content unless you apply these pop-up notifications. These theses should raise suspicion, as sites commonly have a different anti-bot mechanism. Seeing this demand should be the reason to leave the page right away. Sometimes, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not get to the site – the sole page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the push notifications.
How does this work?
The vast majority of web browsers support enabling push notifications from websites. Websites, on the other hand, can send out notifications with the content of their choice. It can be an advertisement of the page posted on this website, or an ad of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but interacting with it will direct you to site Y – because a link to that website was added.
Scoundrels rely on this ability in their attempt to earn money using illegal advertising. They trick victims into turning on pop-ups, and then just spread numerous promotions of anyone they contract with. As you may suppose, no normal organisations will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Captcha.AmazingContent push ads you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same victim may get into a trap of multiple pop-up spamming sites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.
The promotions these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a negligible pay for one person, but when you have a huge number of users and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a much bigger sum. Despite the majority of such banners are ineffective, it can still give all the parties a lot of profit.
Are Captcha.AmazingContent pop-up advertisements dangerous?
Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look harmless – just a colourful window that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you generally see in pop-up notifications. Captcha.amazingcontent.site site is controlled by crooks, who intentionally show hundreds and thousands of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can launch sporadic pop-up ads into a storm of banners. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But problems are not over at this point.
As any other thing related to illegal advertising, Captcha.AmazingContent pop-up ads lack legit deals to offer. Even though hackers make the banners similar to ones from well-known retailers, the website these banners will throw you to are completely different. And these pages may 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, Captcha.AmazingContent push notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.
How to remove Captcha.AmazingContent pop-ups?
Fortunately, Captcha.AmazingContent push notifications removal is not very complicated. They parasite in the browser and cannot conceal themselves in the system. Nonetheless, as I stated above, some pop-up notifications can deliver malware to your computer. It is nearly impossible to show all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a poor idea. For that reason, after disabling the pop-up notifications it is recommended to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended if you have never clicked “Allow” to push notifications, but they still appeared. This situation can be a sign of adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both system recovery and malware scanning and removal purposes, because of its abilities of system recovery and superb detection system.
First and foremost, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in both manual and automatic manner. The former, obviously, requires 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.
You may 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.
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:
- Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option:
- 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:
- Open Menu tab (three strips in upper right corner) and click the “Help” button. In the appeared menu choose “troubleshooting information”:
- In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:
After choosing this option, you will see the next message:
If you use Google Chrome
- Open Settings tab, find the “Advanced” button. In the extended tab choose the “Reset and clean up” button:
- In the appeared list, click on the “Restore settings to their original defaults”:
- 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
- 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:
- 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 Captcha.AmazingContent 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.
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).
How to Remove Captcha.AmazingContent Pop-ups?
Name: Captcha.AmazingContent
Description: Captcha.AmazingContent - 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 Captcha.amazingcontent.site push notifications?” or “why do Captcha.amazingcontent.site pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Captcha.AmazingContent 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
User Review
( votes)References
- More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
- Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.