Cigens.live pop-up advertisements appear when you do not expect, disturbing and annoying you. Still, they are slightly more than annoying notifications – their origins is surely malicious, and they can bring other malware to your system. In this article, I will show you the guide how to remove Cigens.live pop-up notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.
Any time you interact with Cigens.live push notifications will be useless at best. At worst, the pages it can open can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements can 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.
What are Cigens.live pop-up advertisements?
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 Cigens.live pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal pop-ups are offered for you to enable with a legitimate purpose – notify you about the new posts, discounts and so on. It is an effective approach to help your site to keep visitors and help the interested ones to have the best price.
Brief summary of the Cigens.live pop-ups:
| Name | Cigens.live |
| Hosting | AS14061 DigitalOcean, LLC United States, North Bergen |
| IP Address | 157.230.4.182 |
| Malware type | Adware1 |
| Effect | Unwanted pop-up advertisements |
| Hazard level | Medium |
| Malware source | Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites |
| Similar behavior | Cicens, Taitlastwebegan, News |
| Removal method | To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC |
Cigens.live pop-ups, on the other hand, have a deal with less legit web pages. You will commonly see the offer to enable them following the redirection from another site. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless they throw you into such a questionable place. At that point, enabling push notifications is offered as the anti-bot check-up. Alternatively, the sites may refuse to show you the content unless you turn on these pop-up ads. These theses should already be the red flag, as websites usually have a different anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing such an demand is a reason to leave the site doubtlessly. Sometimes, even when you click “Allow”, you will not get to the website – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the push notifications.
Cigens.live push notification.
How does this work?
The majority of browsers support enabling push notifications from websites. Websites, on the other hand, can send out notifications with the content they want. It can be a promotion of the product or a page listed on this particular site, or an ad of their partner page. As a result, you can see the pop-up from site X, but interacting with it will throw you to website Y – because a referral link to the latter was embedded.
Scoundrels bear on this feature in their attempt to gain money through advertising. They trick users into turning on pop-ups, and after that just spread numerous promotions of other crooks they have a deal with. As you can suppose, no image-caring companies will contract with fraudsters. All the Cigens.live popups you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same victim may be trapped by several pop-up spamming sites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.
The banners these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a miserable payment for one view, but when you can send ads to a huge number of users and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a much bigger sum. Even though the majority of these banners giving no result at all, it may still bring all the participants a lot of profit.
Are Cigens.live pop-ups dangerous?
Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look safe – just a colourful pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you generally see in push notifications. Cigens.live website is controlled by crooks, who deliberately spread hundreds and thousands of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any manners of advertising and can make sporadic pop-ups into a hurricane of ads. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But problems are not over at this point.
As any other thing related to illegal advertising, Cigens.live pop-up ads lack legit deals to offer. Even though hackers make the banners looking similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the site these banners 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 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, Cigens.live 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 Cigens.live pop-ups?
Fortunately, Cigens.live pop-ups removal is not very complicated. They sit in the web browser and can’t conceal themselves among system files. However, as I pointed out before, some pop-up notifications can deliver malicious software to your system. It is hard to describe all of the cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a poor idea. For that reason, after disabling the pop-up notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that if you have never allowed pop-up ads, but they still appeared. This situation may point at malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware removal purposes, because of its abilities of system recovery and superb detection system.
Initially, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to do 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.
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 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 Cigens.live 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 Cigens.live Pop-ups?
Name: Cigens.live
Description: Cigens.live - 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 Cigens.live push notifications?” or “why do Cigens.live pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Cigens.live 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.
