Remove Doombrand.xyz Virus — How to Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Doombrand.xyz pop-up alerts can show up unexpectedly, covering the material of the page you visited or opening your browser when you do not need it to be opened.

Clicking on the Doombrand.xyz ad may lead to the injection of other malware or unwanted programs. In this guide, you will see the manual of Doombrand.xyz popups removal in a couple of manners, and also inspecting your system for additional malware existence.

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What are Doombrand.xyz pop-ups?

Doombrand.xyz popups are a consequence of adware presence. Adware is a kind of malware that demonstrates to you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which creates a substantial volume of revenue for adware distributors. These promotions may include explicit composition, or have a web link to malicious content/website, due to the fact that adware maintainers have no purpose to examine the goodness of the material they are going to reveal – their single target is cash.

Doombrand.xyz push notification

Doombrand.xyz push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is a very good, cheap and also very productive marketing tool1. It permits the vendor to link the customers’ interest to their site, as well as the buyers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they intend to purchase. When the consumer will receive a pop-up notification that the TV set he desires to buy is available at the online store he/she checked out previously with a 15% price cut, one will certainly use this possibility and get it. Taking into consideration the extremely low price for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising tool is a much-loved thing among the advertising teams of huge online retail stores.

Nonetheless, such a profitable system could not be missed by virus developers. Potential to show the popup ads forcibly to the victims of malware attack is an ideal basis for malicious manipulations with the popup advertisements. And Doombrand.xyz promotions is just one of hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a short details for the Doombrand.xyz site
Site Doombrand.xyz
Hosting AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 104.21.94.104
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior Renewals, Socialnetwork, Alrecomefuk
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Doombrand.xyz virus?

There are a lot of ways of becoming infected by the adware that lead to the Doombrand.xyz popups tornado. A lion’s part of this computer virus instances is after the free software or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Freeware may also be downloaded from the main website, and the adware is presented as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A plenty of individuals regularly use the uncertain programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, a wide range of utilities that are free, and even hacked programs. All of these sorts of software are risky, because it is quite easy to include a Doombrand.xyz 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.

Doombrand.xyz popup virus may likewise be concealed in the promotion somewhere on the odd web page. Such sites are usually packed with bright and blinking ads, and their proprietors usually permit any type of promos to be placed on their web page. For this reason, clicking on such banners is a shot in the dark: only the advertisement contractor knows what will happen when you click this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you may likewise receive something much more damaging, like ransomware or coin miner; the large share of coin miners circulation is exactly after the malicious advertisements.

People dislike popups

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

Potentially unwanted applications, like Doombrand.xyz popup virus may initiate a wide range of different troubles on your personal computer. Distracting is not the only problem – pop-up notifications can present you the banners, where you are offered to get one more strange application, or “a effective security tool”. Scareware is usually distributed with the last motto. Potentially undesirable programs, in turn, may have spyware functionality. And it is pretty hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a legit one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and dubious antiviruses, popup-related advertisements are also chosen as a distribution method by various trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such viruses is 100% unwanted, and can cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And even if you are not clicking these banners, they may be clicked by whoever who also makes use of your personal computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the things can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve 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 Doombrand.xyz pop-up advertisements?

The guide of Doombrand.xyz adware removal contains 2 sections. Initially, we need to exterminate the malware, and then take care of the results of its activity. The removal procedure is quite easy, because it may be performed even with the use of Microsoft Defender – anti-malware software that is present on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, because of its large resources utilization, along with some errors that can be crucial for some kinds of users, Defender is oftentimes disabled by the users, so its use is most likely impossible. Furthermore, various trojan viruses are able to switch off the embedded antivirus. It is much better to make use of 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 definitely exterminate the malware from your personal computer and also create an invulnerable cover with a Proactive protection function. But let’s deal with Doombrand.xyz adware initially.

Removing Doombrand.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 Doombrand.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 web browser will be connected the correct DNS while connecting to the site you need. Create a text file named “hosts” on your desktop, then open it and fill it with the following lines3:

# 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 problem that makes things a lot harder to fix, particularly without the anti-malware software. The majority of adware variations that are utilized to show you the Doombrand.xyz pop-up promotions are altering the deep browser settings, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to fix your browser settings after your system was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will crash quickly. In certain cases, you will see no crash, but huge lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 secs, and after that it will be back to the normal, until you attempt to open settings 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 Doombrand.xyz Pop-ups?

Name: Doombrand.xyz

Description: Doombrand.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 Doombrand.xyz push notifications?” or “why do Doombrand.xyz pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Doombrand.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 advertisements on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware overview and also the reasons why I advise 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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