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

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Drixen.live pop-up notifications may show up out of the blue, covering the subject of the site you checked or opening your browser when you do not want it to be opened.

Clicking on the Drixen.live promotion can cause the injection of other malware or unwanted programs. In this guide, you will see the tutorial of Drixen.live popups clearing in multiple manners, as well as checking your system for extra viruses presence.

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What are Drixen.live pop-ups?

Drixen.live popups are an effect of adware activity. Adware is a type of malware that demonstrates to you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which generates a large volume of earnings for adware suppliers. These advertisements may consist of explicit material, or have a link to harmful content/website, considering that adware maintainers have no purpose to inspect the goodness of the material they are going to show – their solitary target is money.

Drixen.live push notification

Drixen.live push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is an excellent, cheap and also very effective advertising instrument1. It allows the seller to link the customers’ attention to their site, and the buyers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they want to buy. When the person will get a pop-up alert that the TV set he desires to buy is available at the online shop he/she checked out earlier with a 15% discount, one will definitely use this opportunity and purchase it. Taking into consideration the extremely low price for the popups and their targeting, such a promotion and marketing instrument is a much-loved thing amongst the marketing teams of large online stores.

However, such a successful plan could not be missed by virus creators. Potential to demonstrate the popup ads forcibly to the targets of malware invasion is a great basis for evil-minded tricks with the popup ads. And Drixen.live advertisements is just one of hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a short summary for the Drixen.live site
Site Drixen.live
Hosting AS14061 DigitalOcean, LLC
United States, North Bergen
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 157.230.4.182
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior Driwer, News, Maincaptchanow
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Drixen.live virus?

There are a plenty of ways of becoming infected by the adware that cause the Drixen.live popups storm. A lion’s part of this virus incidents is after the free software or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Freeware can additionally be downloaded from the main site, and the adware is supplied as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A number of users frequently work with the uncertain programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, various apps that are free of cost, and even hacked programs. All of these kinds of software are dangerous, because it is quite simple to include a Drixen.live malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Drixen.live popup virus may likewise be hidden in the promotion somewhere on the strange website. Such sites are in most cases filled with intense and blinking advertisements, and their proprietors generally approve any type of promotions to be published on their page. For this reason, clicking such banners is a shot in the dark: only the advertisement provider knows what will occur when you press this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you can also get something a lot 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 programs, like Drixen.live popup virus can cause a wide range of different troubles on your PC. Distracting is not the only problem – pop-up notifications may display you the advertisements, where you are offered to get another strange program, or “a amazing anti-malware tool”. Scareware is usually spread with the use of the last slogun. Potentially unwanted applications, in turn, may have spyware functions. And it is very hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a normal one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and dubious antiviruses, popup-related banners are also chosen as a distribution method by different trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such malware is 100% unwanted, and can cost you several hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not tapping these ads, they may be clicked by someone who also makes use of your computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the things can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to deal with it without information loss. It is recommended to wipe out the viruses with antivirus programs as soon as possible.

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

The guide of Drixen.live adware elimination includes 2 parts. Initially, we need to exterminate the malware, and afterwards deal with the effects of its activity. The elimination procedure is really easy, due to the fact that it may be performed even with the use of Microsoft Defender – anti-malware program that is available on all computers with Windows 8/10. However, due to its large resources consumption, along with some defects that can be serious for some groups of users, Defender is often disabled by the users, so its utilization is likely impossible. Furthermore, a wide range of trojan viruses can shut off the embedded antivirus. It is far better to use the separated program that will not have such exposures.

I would certainly suggest you to use Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven antivirus tool that will certainly remove the malware from your PC and also create an invulnerable shield with a Proactive protection function. However, let’s manage Drixen.live adware initially.

Removing Drixen.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 Drixen.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 web browsers are reset, you need to make sure that your browser will definitely connect the appropriate DNS while connecting to the site you want. Create a text file named “hosts” on your computer’s desktop, after that 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 trouble that makes things a lot harder to repair, especially without the anti-malware program. A lot of adware versions that are used to show you the Drixen.live pop-up ads are changing 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 crash soon. In some cases, you will see no crash, but huge lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 secs, and after that it will be back to the normal, up 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 Drixen.live Pop-ups?

Name: Drixen.live

Description: Drixen.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 Drixen.live push notifications?” or “why do Drixen.live pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Drixen.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 ads on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware review 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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