Remove Cepundal Pop-up Ads — How to Fix Gude

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Cepundal pop-up notifications can appear out of the blue, covering the content of the site you visited or opening your web browser when you don’t need it to be opened.

Clicking the Cepundal ad may cause the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the manual of Cepundal popups removal in a couple of manners, and also inspecting your PC for additional malware presence.

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What are Cepundal pop-ups?

Cepundal popups are an effect of adware presence. Adware is a type of malware that shows you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click advertisements, which generates a large volume of revenue for adware suppliers. These ads may contain explicit information, or have a link to malicious content/website, because adware maintainers have no reason to examine the goodness of the web content they are going to reveal – their single target is cash.

Cepundal push notification

Cepundal push notification.

Pop-up advertising itself is an excellent, affordable and also very efficient marketing solution1. It permits the vendor to attach the customers’ interest to their site, and the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they wish to buy. When the person will receive a pop-up alert that the TV set he wishes to purchase is provided at the online shop he/she visited earlier with a 15% discount, one will definitely use this opportunity and get it. Taking into consideration the extremely small cost for the popups and their targeting, such a marketing tool is a favourite thing amidst the marketing teams of huge online stores.

However, such a rewarding strategy could not be missed by virus developers. Potential to show the popup advertisements forcibly to the people of malware invasion is a great basis for evil-minded manipulations with the popup ads. And Cepundal.com advertisements is one of hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a short details for the Cepundal site
SiteCepundal.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
Infection TypeAdware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address172.67.222.31
SymptomsAnnoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behaviorEntmatchw, Playadvanced, Spicaladapt
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Cepundal virus?

There are a number of ways of becoming infected by the adware that create the Cepundal popups storm. A lion’s part of this virus cases is after the free software or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Freeware can also be downloaded from the official web page, and the adware is offered as a legitimate bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A huge amount of people often use the dubious programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, a wide range of tools that are free, and even hacked programs. Every one of these kinds of software are risky, due to the fact that it is extremely simple to integrate a Cepundal malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Cepundal popup malware may additionally be concealed in the advertisement somewhere on the unusual site. Such web pages are typically full of colorful and blinking advertisements, and their proprietors generally accept any type of promos to be placed on their page. Thus, clicking such banners is a shot in the dark: only the advertisement contractor realizes what will occur when you press this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you may also receive something a lot more threatening, like ransomware or coin miner; the big share of coin miners circulation is exactly after the malicious advertisements.

People dislike popups

The statistic shows that people dislike popup advertising more than other types of promotions

Potentially unwanted applications, like Cepundal popup virus may cause a variety of different troubles on your computer. Distracting is not the single problem – pop-up notifications can display you the promotions, where you are offered to download another unknown program, or “a effective security tool”. Scareware is often distributed under the last slogun. Potentially unwanted applications, in turn, may have spyware functions. And it is pretty hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a good one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and dubious antiviruses, popup-related promotions are also used as a spreading way by different trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such malware is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you several hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not interacting with these ads, they can be clicked by whoever who also makes use of your computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation may become much more serious, and it will be much harder to deal with it without information loss. It is recommended to wipe out the viruses with antivirus applications as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Cepundal pop-up advertisements?

The tutorial of Cepundal adware removal includes 2 parts. First, we need to get rid of the malware, and after that take care of the effects of its action. The elimination procedure is quite easy, since it may be done even with making use of Microsoft Defender – anti-virus software that is present on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, because of its large resources consumption, as well as some failures that can be serious for some categories of users, Defender is frequently turned off by the users, so its utilization is likely impossible. What’s more, a variety of trojan viruses have the ability to disable the embedded antivirus. It is better to use the separated program that will not have such weakness.

I’d recommend you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven antivirus tool that will undoubtedly remove the malware from your computer and make an impenetrable cover with a Proactive protection function. But let’s take care of Cepundal adware first.

Removing Cepundal popup virus with GridinSoft Anti-Malware

  • Download and install GridinSoft Anti-Malware. After the installation, you will be offered to perform the Standard Scan. Approve this action.
  • Gridinsoft Anti-Malware during the scan process

  • Standard scan checks the logical disk where the system files are stored, together with the files of programs you have already installed. The scan lasts up to 6 minutes.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware scan results

  • When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Cepundal malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware - After Cleaning

Now, when the computer is clean of viruses, we can proceed to the browser reset. You can do this step manually, as well as with the use of GridinSoft Anti-Malware.

Reset browser settings to default

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 web browsers are reset, you need to make sure that your browser will connect the appropriate DNS while connecting to the website you want. Create a text file named “hosts” on your desktop, then open it and fill it with the following text3:

# 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.

Nevertheless, there is one problem that makes the things much harder to fix, particularly without the anti-malware program. Most of adware variations that are used to show you the Cepundal pop-up advertisements are altering the deep browser settings, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to fix your browser settings after your computer was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly collapse soon. Sometimes, you will see no crash, however, huge lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 seconds, and after that it will be back to the normal, until you try to open settings once more.

Reset your browser settings 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 the options for each browser. By default, they are set up in the manner which 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 last is also able to reset the HOSTS file without any additional commands.

How to Remove Cepundal Pop-ups?

Name: Cepundal

Description: Cepundal - 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 Cepundal.com push notifications?” or “why do Cepundal.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Cepundal 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 pop-up ads on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware overview and the reasons why I advise it for malware removal.
  3. 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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