Remove Donik.live Pop-up Ads — How to Fix Gude

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Donik.live pop-up notifications can show up unexpectedly, covering the post of the page you visited or opening your browser when you don’t wish it to be opened.

Clicking the Donik.live ad may lead to the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this post, you will see the guide of Donik.live popups clearing in multiple methods, and also inspecting your PC for extra malware existence.

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What are Donik.live pop-ups?

Donik.live popups are an outcome of adware presence. Adware is a type of malware that demonstrates to you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click promotions, which produces a large amount of earnings for adware suppliers. These promotions might include sometimes shocking composition, or have a web link to malevolent content/website, due to the fact that adware maintainers have no reason to inspect the goodness of the material they are going to show – their solitary target is money.

Donik.live push notification

Donik.live push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is an excellent, low-cost and extremely efficient advertising instrument1. It allows the seller to attach the buyers’ attention to their site, and the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they wish to purchase. When the person will get a pop-up notification that the TV set he likes to buy is available at the online store he/she checked out previously with a 15% price cut, one will definitely use this chance and buy it. Considering the incredibly low price for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising and marketing instrument is a favorite thing among the advertising departments of large internet retailers.

Nevertheless, such a rewarding system could not be missed by malware creators. Potential to show the popup advertisements forcibly to the victims of malware invasion is a great basis for malevolent tricks with the popup ads. And Donik.live promotions is one of hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a details for the Donik.live site
SiteDonik.live
HostingAS14061 DigitalOcean, LLC
United States, Santa Clara
Infection TypeAdware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address147.182.255.121
SymptomsAnnoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behaviorAdvertizementtoyou, News, Datingtoday
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Donik.live virus?

There are a huge amount of methods of getting infected by the adware that create the Donik.live popups storm. A lion’s part of this virus cases is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Freeware may likewise be downloaded from the official website, and the adware is provided as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A lot of individuals frequently utilize the uncertain programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, various apps that are free of cost, or even hacked programs. All of these kinds of applications are dangerous, due to the fact that it is very simple to include a Donik.live malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

Donik.live popup virus can likewise be hidden in the advertisement somewhere on the strange website. Such web pages are typically packed with colorful and blinking advertisements, and their owners usually permit any promotions to be posted on their page. Hence, clicking such banners is a shot in the dark: only the ad provider realizes what will happen when you press this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or unwanted programs, you may also receive something far more dangerous, like ransomware or coin miner; the substantial share of coin miners circulation 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 Donik.live pop-up virus can initiate a variety of troubles on your personal computer. Distracting is not the single effect – pop-ups can present you the advertisements, where you are offered to get one more unknown program, or “a amazing anti-malware tool”. Scareware is usually spread under the last motto. Potentially unwanted applications, in turn, may have spyware functionality. 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 pseudo antiviruses, popup-related ads are also used as a distribution method by various trojan viruses, for example – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such malware is 100% unwanted, and can cost you hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not tapping these advertisements, they can be clicked by whoever who also makes use of your personal computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation may become much more serious, and it will be much harder to deal with it without data and money loss. It is recommended to get rid of the viruses with antivirus applications as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Donik.live pop-up advertisements?

The guide of Donik.live adware elimination contains 2 sections. Initially, we need to exterminate the malware, and then repair the effects of its activity. The elimination task is very easy, since it may be executed even with the use of Microsoft Defender – security tool that is available on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nonetheless, due to its significant resources utilization, along with some problems that may be pivotal for some kinds of users, Defender is oftentimes turned off by the users, so its utilization is probably impossible. What’s more, a variety of trojan viruses have the ability to disable the embedded antivirus. It is much better to use the separated program that will not have such vulnerabilities.

I’d suggest you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven anti-malware tool that will undoubtedly exterminate the viruses from your PC and also create an invulnerable shield with a Proactive protection feature. But let’s manage Donik.live adware initially.

Removing Donik.live 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 Donik.live 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 browser will definitely be connected the proper DNS while connecting to the website you want. Make 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.

However, there is one issue that makes things much harder to restore, especially without the anti-malware software. A lot of adware variations that are used to show you the Donik.live pop-up ads are modifying the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to change your browser settings after your computer was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly crash quickly. In some cases, you will see no crash, but significant lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 seconds, and then it will be back to the typical, up until you attempt 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 Donik.live Pop-ups?

Name: Donik.live

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

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References

  1. More about pop-up advertisements on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware overview and also the reasons why I recommend 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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