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

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Crystalcrafter.top pop-up advertisements appear out of the blue, detracting and irritating you. Nonetheless, that is much more than just notifications – their origins is purely malignant, and they can install other malware to your computer. In this post, I will show you how to remove Crystalcrafter.top pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Crystalcrafter.top pop-up advertisements will be ineffective at best. At worst, the web pages it can open can introduce malware to your system. These push 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 Crystalcrafter.top push 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 notifications and Crystalcrafter.top notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal push notifications are offered for you to enable on different sites with a understandable purpose – keep you aware about the latest articles, discounts and so on. It is a useful tool to help your site to retain visitors and help the interested ones to have the best deal.

Brief summary of the Crystalcrafter.top pop-up ads:
Name Crystalcrafter.top
Hosting AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address 104.21.7.3
Malware type Adware1
Effect Unwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard level Medium
Malware source Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behavior Searchesmia, Flamebeard, Misarea
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Crystalcrafter.top pop-ups, in contrast, have a deal with unlegit sites. You will commonly witness the offer to turn them on after a redirection from another page. It’s OK to see redirects unless they throw you to such a dubious place. In this case, enabling push notifications is served under the guise of the anti-DDoS check. In other cases, the web pages can refuse to show you the content unless you enable these pop-up notifications. These requirements should raise suspicion, as websites usually have a different anti-bot mechanism. Spectating such an requirement is a reason to close the page doubtlessly. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the site – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up advertisements.

Crystalcrafter.top push notification

Crystalcrafter.top push notification.

How does it work?

Most of web browsers support turning on push notifications from websites. Sites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content they want. It can be a promotion of the page published on this particular website, as well as an ad of their partner page. As a result, you can see the push notification from site X, but clicking it will direct you to site Y – because a link to the latter was built in.

Crooks bear on this feature in their attempt to gain money using illegal advertising. They trick victims into allowing them to show the banners, and after that just spread hundreds of banners of other crooks they contract with. As you can suppose, no benevolent organisations will contract with fraudsters. All the Crystalcrafter.top notifications you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. In some cases, the same user can be trapped by several pop-up spamming web pages, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The promotions these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It generally provides a negligible payment for one person, but when you can send ads to a huge number of victims and make it hundreds of times each day – that is a much more significant sum. Despite most of these ads are ineffective, it can still bring all the parties a lot of profit.

Are Crystalcrafter.top push notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look safe – just a colourful 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 advertisements. Crystalcrafter.top site is controlled by fraudsters, who intendedly show hundreds of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any common sense and can make sporadic pop-up notifications into a hurricane of ads. For weak computers, that may be enough to make the system slower. But problems are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing related to illegal advertising, Crystalcrafter.top pop-ups lack legit deals to offer. Even though crooks make the ads similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the web page 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 pop-up ads 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, Crystalcrafter.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 Crystalcrafter.top pop-ups?

Fortunately, Crystalcrafter.top push notifications removal is not very complicated. They reside in the web browser and cannot conceal themselves among system files. However, as I told before, some pop-ups may deliver malicious programs to your computer. It is hard to predict all cases, and manual malware removal is inconvenient. 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 notifications, and they still appeared. That may point at malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both system recovery and malware scanning and removal purposes, thanks to its system recovery functionality and multi-component detection system.

Initially, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that 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 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 Crystalcrafter.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 Crystalcrafter.top Pop-ups?

Name: Crystalcrafter.top

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