Remove Captchagenius.top Pop-up Ads — How to Fix Gude

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Captchagenius.top pop-up advertisements appear out of the blue, distracting and irritating you. However, that is slightly more than just notifications – their origins is surely malicious, and they may install other malicious stuff to your PC. In this article, I will show you the guide how to remove Captchagenius.top pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Captchagenius.top push notifications will be useless at best. At worst, the websites it can open may introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups may also promote fake 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 Captchagenius.top 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 pop-up advertisements and Captchagenius.top notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Common pop-up advertisements are offered for you to enable on different sites with a legitimate purpose – keep you aware about the fresh posts, discounts and so on. It is an effective approach to help your website to keep visitors and help the interested ones to have the best price.

Brief summary of the Captchagenius.top pop-ups:
NameCaptchagenius.top
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address172.67.140.132
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorNews, Betterwebb, News
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Captchagenius.top pop-up notifications, in contrast, have a deal with unlegit websites. You will commonly observe the offer to enable them after a redirection from another website. It’s OK to see redirects unless it throws you into such a dubious place. In this case, turning on pop-up ads is served as the anti-DDoS check-up. Alternatively, the websites can refuse to show you the content unless you turn on these pop-up advertisements. These demands should raise suspicion, as websites commonly have a different anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing this demand is a reason to skip the site doubtlessly. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not see the site – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up notifications.

Captchagenius.top push notification

Captchagenius.top push notification.

How does it work?

Most of web browsers support enabling pop-ups from websites. Sites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content they like. It may be an advertisement of the page posted on this website, or an ad of their partner page. As a result, you can see the push notification from site X, but interacting with it will throw you to website Y – because a link to the latter was added.

Cybercriminals 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 hundreds of banners of anyone they contract with. As you can suppose, no normal organisations will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Captchagenius.top 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 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 usually provides a miserable commission for one viewer, but when you have hundreds of victims and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a way bigger sum. Even though the majority of these ads giving no result at all, it can still bring all the participants a lot of profit.

Are Captchagenius.top pop-up ads dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they may look harmless – just a colourful pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the things this window promotes differ sharply from what you generally see in pop-ups. Captchagenius.top website is ruled by fraudsters, who intentionally show hundreds and thousands of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can launch sporadic pop-ups into a hurricane of banners. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But troubles are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing related to illegal advertising, Captchagenius.top pop-up notifications don’t have legit offers. Even when hackers make the ads 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-ups 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, Captchagenius.top push notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Captchagenius.top pop-ups?

Fortunately, Captchagenius.top pop-up notifications removal is pretty easy. They reside in the browser and cannot hide themselves on a disk. Nevertheless, as I stated above, some pop-up notifications can promote malware to your computer. It is nearly impossible to predict all cases, and manual malware removal is inconvenient. Thus, after removing the source of the pop-up ads the best option is to use anti-malware software. I’d especially recommend that if you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up advertisements, and they still appeared. This situation can point at malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both system recovery and malware scanning purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and multi-layer detection system.

First and foremost, 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 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 Captchagenius.top 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 Captchagenius.top Pop-ups?

Name: Captchagenius.top

Description: Captchagenius.top - 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 Captchagenius.top push notifications?” or “why do Captchagenius.top pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Captchagenius.top 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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