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

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Captchasafe.top push notifications appear out of the blue, distracting and irritating you. Nonetheless, that is slightly more than simple pop-ups – their essence is purely malignant, and they may introduce other malicious stuff to your system. In this article, I will show you the guide how to remove Captchasafe.top pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Captchasafe.top pop-up advertisements will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the pages it can show you can introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups can also promote fake online shopping websites 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 Captchasafe.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 Captchasafe.top notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Common push notifications are offered for you to enable with a legitimate 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 visitors to have the best price.

Short summary of the Captchasafe.top pop-ups:
NameCaptchasafe.top
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address172.67.153.215
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorTopdomainblog, Crystalcrafter, Searchesmia
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Captchasafe.top push notifications, as opposed, are related to untrustworthy sites. You will generally see the proposition to turn them on following the redirection from another site. 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-bot check. Alternatively, the sites may refuse to show you the contents unless you apply these pop-up advertisements. These requirements should already be the red flag, as sites commonly feature a different anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing this offer is a reason to leave the site right away. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the web page – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up advertisements.

Captchasafe.top push notification

Captchasafe.top push notification.

How does it work?

Most of web browsers support enabling pop-ups from websites. Sites, on the other hand, may send notifications with the content they like. It may be a promotion of the page published on this particular site, as well as a promotion of their partner page. As a result, you can see the push notification from site X, but interacting with it will direct you to website Y – because a link to that website was built in.

Cyber burglars rely on this ability in their approach to earn money through advertising. They trick users into allowing them to show the banners, and after that just spread hundreds of ads of anyone they have a deal with. As you may suppose, no benevolent companies will have a business with fraudsters. All the Captchasafe.top push ads you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same user can get into a trap of several pop-up spamming websites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a negligible payment for one view, but when you have a huge number of victims and show them hundreds of ads every day – that is a much more significant sum. Despite the majority of these banners are ineffective, it may still give all the participants a lot of money.

Are Captchasafe.top pop-up notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they can look safe – just a colourful pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-up ads. Captchasafe.top web page is controlled by fraudsters, who intendedly throw hundreds and thousands of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can make sporadic pop-up notifications into a hurricane of promotions. 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 that touches illegal advertising, Captchasafe.top pop-up advertisements don’t have legit deals to offer. Even when crooks make the ads looking similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, 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 push notifications 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, Captchasafe.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 Captchasafe.top pop-ups?

Fortunately, Captchasafe.top pop-up ads removal is not very complicated. They sit in the browser and cannot conceal themselves among system files. However, as I told above, some pop-ups can introduce malicious software to your computer. It is hard to show all of the cases, and manual malware removal is inconvenient. Thus, after disabling the pop-ups the best option is to use anti-malware software. That is especially recommended if you have never allowed push notifications, but they still appeared. That can be a sign of malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both system recovery and malware scanning purposes, because of its abilities of system recovery and multi-component detection system.

Initially, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to accomplish in manual or automated way. 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.

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 site 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 Captchasafe.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 Captchasafe.top Pop-ups?

Name: Captchasafe.top

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