Equaffis pop-up advertisements appear out of the blue, detracting and irritating you. Nonetheless, they are slightly more than annoying pop-ups – their essence is purely malignant, and they can install other malware to your PC. In this post, I will guide you on how to remove Equaffis pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.
Any interaction with Equaffis pop-up advertisements will be useless at best. At worst, the pages it can open may introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements may also promote fake shopping websites which will take your money and payment info. The latter generally ends up with losing all the money you have on the exposed card.
What are Equaffis pop-up 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-ups and Equaffis notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Common pop-up ads are offered for you to enable with a legitimate purpose – notify you about the latest posts, discounts and so on. It is an effective approach to help your site to keep visitors and help the interested visitors to have the best deal.
Short summary of the Equaffism.com pop-up ads:
Name | Equaffism.com |
Hosting | AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc. United States, San Francisco |
IP Address | 104.21.20.145 |
Malware type | Adware1 |
Effect | Unwanted pop-up advertisements |
Hazard level | Medium |
Malware source | Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites |
Similar behavior | Herofherlittl, Bipers, Tekrulsasurvey |
Removal method | To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC |
Equaffis push notifications, as opposed, are related to unlegit sites. You will generally observe the offer to enable them following the redirection from another page. It’s OK to see redirects unless it throws you into such a questionable place. In this case, turning on pop-up notifications is served as the anti-bot check-up. In other cases, the web pages may refuse to show you the contents unless you apply these push notifications. These requirements should already raise suspicion, as sites generally feature a different anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing such an offer should be the reason to leave the page right away. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not get to the web page – the sole page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up notifications.
How does this work?
The vast majority of browsers support turning on pop-ups from sites. Websites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content they want. It may be an advertisement of the product listed for sale on this site, or a promotion of their partner page. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but interacting with it will throw you to site Y – because a link to that website was added.
Scoundrels rely on this ability in their approach to gain money using illegal advertising. They trick users into allowing the pop-ups, and after that just spread hundreds of promotions of anyone they have a deal with. As you can suppose, no legit companies will have a business with fraudsters. All the Equaffis notifications you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same victim can be trapped by several pop-up spamming web pages, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.
The ads these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a negligible payment for one viewer, but when you have a huge number of users and make it hundreds of times each day – that is a way bigger sum. Even though most of such banners giving no result at all, it can still bring all the participants a lot of profit.
Are Equaffis pop-ups dangerous?
Yes, they are. At the surface, they may look harmless – just a blinking window that appears from time to time. However, the things this window promotes differ sharply from what you generally see in pop-up ads. Equaffism.com site is controlled by fraudsters, who deliberately spread tons of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any common sense and can launch sporadic pop-ups into a hurricane of promotions. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But troubles are not over at this point.
As with any other thing that touches illegal advertising, Equaffis push notifications lack legit offers. Even though crooks make the banners similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the web page these banners will throw you to are completely different. And these pages may 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 notifications 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, Equaffis push notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.
How to remove Equaffis pop-ups?
Fortunately, Equaffis pop-up ads removal is not very complicated. They parasite in the browser and can’t hide themselves on a disk. However, as I told before, some pop-up notifications can promote malicious programs to your system. It is nearly impossible to predict all of the cases, and manual malware removal is a bad idea. Thus, after removing the source of the pop-up advertisements it is recommended to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that in the case when you have never allowed push notifications, and they still appeared. This situation can be a sign of adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware removal purposes, thanks to its system recovery functionality and superb detection system.
First of all, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in manual or automated way. The former, obviously, requires more time to complete and can 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.
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.
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:
- Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option:
- 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:
- Open Menu tab (three strips in upper right corner) and click the “Help” button. In the appeared menu choose “troubleshooting information”:
- In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:
After choosing this option, you will see the next message:
If you use Google Chrome
- Open Settings tab, find the “Advanced” button. In the extended tab choose the “Reset and clean up” button:
- In the appeared list, click on the “Restore settings to their original defaults”:
- 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
- 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:
- 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 Equaffis 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.
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).
How to Remove Equaffis Pop-ups?
Name: Equaffis
Description: Equaffis - 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 Equaffism.com push notifications?” or “why do Equaffism.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Equaffis 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
User Review
( votes)References
- More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
- Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.