Remove Directsad.xyz Pop-up Virus — How to Remove?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Directsad.xyz pop-up notices can appear out of the blue, covering the post of the site you visited or opening your browser when you don’t want it to be opened.

Clicking on the Directsad.xyz advertisement may trigger the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this guide, you will see the guideline of Directsad.xyz popups removal in a couple of ways, as well as examining your system for other malware existence.

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What are Directsad.xyz pop-ups?

Directsad.xyz popups are a result of adware activity. Adware is a type of malware that demonstrates to you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which produces a major volume of earnings for adware suppliers. These promotions may have explicit content, or have a link to malicious content/website, since adware maintainers have no reason to examine the goodness of the material they are going to reveal – their single target is money.

Directsad.xyz push notification

Directsad.xyz push notification.

Pop-up advertising itself is a very good, cheap and extremely efficient marketing solution1. It permits the vendor to attach the buyers’ attention to their website, as well as the buyers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they intend to purchase. When the customer will get a pop-up alert that the TV set he wishes to purchase is provided at the online store he/she saw previously with a 15% price cut, one will certainly use this possibility and purchase it. Taking into consideration the exceptionally low price for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising and marketing method is a much-loved thing among the marketing teams of large internet retailers.

However, such a rewarding scheme could not be missed by virus developers. Potential to show the popup advertisements forcibly to the victims of malware invasion is an ideal basis for malicious tricks with the popup ads. And Directsad.xyz advertisements is just one of hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a details for the Directsad.xyz
Site Directsad.xyz
Hosting AS16509 Amazon.com, Inc.
Germany, Frankfurt am Main
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 99.84.88.46
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior Papereu, Paperus, Urgentscanur
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Directsad.xyz virus?

There are a number of ways of becoming contaminated by the adware that cause the Directsad.xyz popups tornado. A lion’s part of this malware cases is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Free software may likewise be downloaded from the official website, and the adware is provided as a legitimate bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A huge amount of users oftentimes use the dubious programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, various apps that are free, or perhaps hacked programs. Every one of these sorts of software are dangerous, since it is very simple to integrate a Directsad.xyz malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

Directsad.xyz popup malware can also be hidden in the advertisement somewhere on the odd web page. Such websites are usually packed with bright and blinking ads, and their owners typically permit any promotions to be published on their web page. For this reason, clicking 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 may additionally receive something far more risky, like ransomware or coin miner; the substantial share of coin miners circulation is exactly after the malicious ads.

People dislike popups

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

Potentially unwanted applications, like Directsad.xyz pop-up virus may provoke a variety of different problems on your computer. Distracting is not the only problem – pop-up notifications may display you the advertisements, where you are offered to get one more strange program, or “a amazing anti-malware tool”. Scareware is usually spread under the last motto. Potentially undesirable programs, in turn, can have spyware functions. And it is pretty hard to distinguish the undesirable app from a good one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and dubious antiviruses, popup-related ads are also used as a distribution way by different trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of activity 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 may be clicked by whoever who also makes use of your computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the things may become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without data loss. It is recommended to remove the viruses with antivirus programs as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Directsad.xyz pop-up advertisements?

The manual of Directsad.xyz adware elimination includes 2 parts. Initially, we need to remove the malware, and after that fix the results of its action. The removal task is really easy, due to the fact that it can be done even with the use of Microsoft Defender – security program that is present on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. Nonetheless, as a result of its large resources utilization, as well as some problems that may be serious for some groups of individuals, Defender is often disabled by the users, so its usage is most likely impossible. What’s more, a wide range of trojan viruses are capable to turn off the embedded antivirus. It is better to make use of the separated program that will not have such vulnerabilities.

I would certainly advise you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven anti-malware tool that will undoubtedly exterminate the viruses from your personal computer and also make an invulnerable cover with a Proactive protection feature. But let’s handle Directsad.xyz adware first.

Removing Directsad.xyz 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 Directsad.xyz 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 definitely be connected the appropriate DNS while connecting to the site you want. Make a text file titled “hosts” on your computer’s 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 things much harder to fix, particularly without the anti-malware software. A lot of adware versions that are used to show you the Directsad.xyz pop-up ads are modifying the deep browser setups, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to change your browser settings after your PC was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will crash soon. Sometimes, you will see no crash, however, huge lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 secs, and then it will be back to the normal, up 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 Directsad.xyz Pop-ups?

Name: Directsad.xyz

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