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

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Clevercaptcha.top pop-up notifications can appear unexpectedly, covering the post of the page you checked or opening your browser when you do not desire it to be opened.

Clicking on the Clevercaptcha.top promotion may trigger the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this post, you will see the tutorial of Clevercaptcha.top popups removal in various manners, and also checking your PC for other malware existence.

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What are Clevercaptcha.top pop-ups?

Clevercaptcha.top popups are an effect of adware action. Adware is a type of malware that demonstrates to you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click promotions, which produces a significant volume of profit for adware distributors. These promotions might have explicit material, or have a link to harmful content/website, because adware maintainers have no purpose to examine the goodness of the content they are going to show – their single target is money.

Clevercaptcha.top push notification

Clevercaptcha.top push notification.

Pop-up promotions itself is a very good, cheap and also very successful marketing instrument1. It makes it possible for the vendor to attach the buyers’ interest to their website, and the customers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they want to purchase. When the customer will get a pop-up alert that the TV set he desires to buy is offered at the online store he/she saw earlier with a 15% discount, one will definitely use this possibility and buy it. Considering the extremely low cost for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising tool is a much-loved thing amongst the advertising departments of big internet retailers.

However, such a successful system could not be missed by malware creators. Potential to demonstrate the popup ads forcibly to the victims of malware attack is an ideal basis for evil-minded tricks with the popup advertisements. And Clevercaptcha.top promotions is just one of hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a short info for the Clevercaptcha.top
Site Clevercaptcha.top
Hosting AS20473 The Constant Company, LLC
Netherlands, Amsterdam
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 95.179.186.10
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior Ukndaspiratioty, Current, Getlastnews
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Clevercaptcha.top virus?

There are a plenty of ways of becoming infected by the adware that trigger the Clevercaptcha.top popups tornado. A lion’s part of this virus incidents is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Free software can likewise be downloaded from the main web page, and the adware is delivered as a legitimate bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A plenty of individuals oftentimes utilize the dubious programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, a wide range of tools that are free, and even hacked programs. All of these sorts of programs are risky, because it is extremely simple to build in a Clevercaptcha.top 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.

Clevercaptcha.top popup virus may likewise be concealed in the promotion somewhere on the odd site. Such sites are typically packed with colorful and blinking ads, and their owners usually accept any promos to be posted on their web page. Thus, clicking on such banners is a shot in the dark: only the advertisement provider realizes what will happen when you click this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you can also get something much more hazardous, like ransomware or coin miner; the large share of coin miners distribution is exactly after the malicious promotions.

People dislike popups

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

Potentially unwanted programs, like Clevercaptcha.top popup virus may cause a wide range of problems on your PC. Distracting is not the single problem – pop-ups may present you the advertisements, where you are offered to download one more unknown application, or “a effective anti-malware tool”. Scareware is often distributed with the last motto. Potentially unwanted applications, in turn, may have spyware functionality. And it is quite hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a normal one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and dubious antiviruses, popup-related promotions are also chosen as a distribution method by various trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such malware is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not interacting with these ads, they can be clicked by whoever who also uses your personal computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the things may become much more serious, and it will be much harder to deal with it without information loss. It is recommended to eliminate the viruses with antivirus programs as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Clevercaptcha.top pop-up advertisements?

The tutorial of Clevercaptcha.top adware elimination includes 2 parts. First, we need to deal with the malware, and afterwards correct the effects of its activity. The elimination process is pretty simple, since it can be performed even with using Microsoft Defender – security program that is present on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. However, because of its significant resources utilization, as well as some errors that may be crucial for some types of individuals, Defender is often turned off by the users, so its use is probably impossible. Additionally, various trojan viruses are capable to disable the embedded antivirus. It is much better to make use of the separated program that will not have such weakness.

I would certainly recommend you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven anti-malware device that will surely exterminate the viruses from your computer and make an invulnerable shield with a Proactive protection feature. But let’s take care of Clevercaptcha.top adware initially.

Removing Clevercaptcha.top 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 Clevercaptcha.top 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 browsers are reset, you need to make sure that your web browser will definitely connect the accurate DNS while connecting to the website you want. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following content3:

# 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.

Nonetheless, there is one trouble that makes the things a lot harder to fix, particularly without the anti-malware software. Most of adware variations that are utilized to show you the Clevercaptcha.top pop-up ads are modifying the deep browser settings, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to fix your browser settings after your machine was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will collapse soon. In certain cases, you will see no crash, however, large lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 secs, and afterwards it will be back to the typical, till you try to open settings once again.

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 Clevercaptcha.top Pop-ups?

Name: Clevercaptcha.top

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