Captchamaster.top Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Captchamaster.top push notifications appear when you do not expect, disturbing and annoying you. However, that is way more than simple pop-up ads – their origins is surely malignant, and they can introduce other malicious stuff to your system. In this article, I will guide you on how to remove Captchamaster.top pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Captchamaster.top pop-up notifications will be ineffective at best. At worst, the pages it can throw you to may introduce malware to your system. These pop-up notifications may also advertise 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 Captchamaster.top 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 pop-up advertisements and Captchamaster.top pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal pop-up notifications are offered for you to enable with a benevolent purpose – notify you about the latest publications, goods for sale and so on. It is an effective approach to help your site to retain visitors and help the interested ones to have the best price.

Short summary of the Captchamaster.top pop-ups:
NameCaptchamaster.top
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address104.21.68.157
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorGehoochosurvey, Webpushcloud, Adblockertool
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Captchamaster.top pop-up advertisements, in contrast, are related to untrustworthy web pages. You will commonly observe the offer to enable them following the redirection from another page. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless it throws you to such a dubious place. At that point, turning on push notifications is offered under the guise of the anti-bot filtering. Alternatively, the sites may refuse to show you the content unless you enable these push notifications. These demands should already raise suspicion, as websites usually feature a different anti-bot mechanism. Seeing this offer should be the reason to skip the site right away. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the web page – the sole page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up advertisements.

Captchamaster.top push notification

Captchamaster.top push notification.

How does this work?

The vast majority of web browsers support enabling push notifications from websites. Websites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content they want. It may be an advertisement of the page listed on this particular 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 website Y – because a referral link to the latter was added.

Cybercriminals rely on this feature in their approach to gain money using illegal advertising. They trick users into allowing the pop-ups, and after that just spread numerous ads of anyone they have a deal with. As you may suppose, no image-caring organisations will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Captchamaster.top popups you may see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same victim can be trapped by several pop-up spamming websites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these rascals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a negligible pay for one viewer, but when you have a huge number of users and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a much bigger sum. Even though most of these banners are ineffective, it can still give all the participants a lot of money.

Are Captchamaster.top pop-up notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they may look harmless – just a blinking pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the things this window promotes differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-up ads. Captchamaster.top web page is ruled by fraudsters, who deliberately throw tons of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can launch sporadic push notifications into a hurricane of promotions. For weak computers, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all problems these pop-up advertisements carry.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing that touches illegal advertising, Captchamaster.top push notifications do not contain any legit deals to offer. Even though crooks make the ads looking similar to ones from well-known retailers, the site these ads 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-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, Captchamaster.top pop-up notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Captchamaster.top pop-ups?

Fortunately, Captchamaster.top pop-up ads removal is pretty easy. They reside in the web browser and can’t hide themselves on a disk. However, as I stated above, some pop-up advertisements can introduce malicious programs to your system. It is nearly impossible to show all of the cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a bad idea. Thus, after getting rid of the pop-ups the best option is to use anti-malware software. That is especially recommended if you have never clicked “Allow” to push notifications, but they still appeared. This situation can be a sign of malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware removal purposes, because of its abilities of system recovery and multi-layer detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to accomplish 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 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.

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 website 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 Captchamaster.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 Captchamaster.top Pop-ups?

Name: Captchamaster.top

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