Remove Ethicsage Pop-up Ads — How to Fix Gude

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Ethicsage pop-up alerts can show up out of the blue, covering the material of the site you visited or opening your browser when you do not want it to be opened.

Clicking on the Ethicsage ad can trigger the injection of other malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the guide of Ethicsage popups clearing in various manners, as well as examining your personal computer for additional malware presence.

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What are Ethicsage pop-ups?

Ethicsage popups are an outcome of adware presence. Adware is a sort of malware that presents you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which creates a significant volume of revenue for adware suppliers. These promotions might contain sometimes shocking information, or have a link to harmful content/website, because adware maintainers have no reason to examine the goodness of the material they are going to show – their solitary target is cash.

Ethicsage push notification

Ethicsage push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is an excellent, cheap and also extremely productive advertising tool1. It enables the seller to link the buyers’ attention to their site, and the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they want to buy. When the customer will get a pop-up notification that the TV set he likes to purchase is offered at the online store he/she visited previously with a 15% discount, one will undoubtedly use this chance and get it. Taking into consideration the very small cost for the popups and their targeting, such a marketing instrument is a favourite thing among the marketing teams of big online retailers.

However, such a successful scheme could not be missed by malware developers. Option to demonstrate the popup ads forcibly to the victims of malware attack is an ideal basis for malicious manipulations with the popup ads. And Ethicsage.com ads is one of hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a short details for the Ethicsage
SiteEthicsage.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
Infection TypeAdware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address188.114.97.3
SymptomsAnnoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behaviorBuynads, Hanut, Operatestronguberinfo
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Ethicsage virus?

There are a number of methods of becoming infected by the adware that trigger the Ethicsage popups tornado. A lion’s part of this malware instances is after the free software or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Free software may likewise be downloaded from the main web page, and the adware is provided as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A number of individuals oftentimes work with the unreliable programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, different apps that are free, and even hacked programs. Every one of these sorts of applications are risky, since it is very easy to integrate a Ethicsage 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.

Ethicsage popup malware can likewise be concealed in the ad somewhere on the odd website. Such web pages are usually loaded with intense and blinking advertisements, and their proprietors generally permit any kind of promos to be published on their page. For this reason, clicking on such banners is a shot in the dark: only the advertisement contractor realizes what will happen when you press this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you may also receive something a lot more damaging, like ransomware or coin miner; the big share of coin miners distribution 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 Ethicsage popup virus can cause a variety of troubles on your personal computer. Distracting is not the single effect – pop-ups can display you the ads, where you are offered to get one more strange program, or “a perfect security tool”. Scareware is often distributed with the last slogun. Potentially undesirable applications, in turn, may have spyware functionality. And it is pretty hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a normal one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and fake antiviruses, popup-related banners are also used as a distribution method by various trojan viruses, for example – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such viruses is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And even if you are not tapping these promotions, they may be clicked by whoever who also uses your computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to deal with it without data loss. It is recommended to eliminate the viruses with antivirus programs as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Ethicsage pop-up advertisements?

The tutorial of Ethicsage adware clearing consists of 2 parts. First, we need to exterminate the malware, and then correct the consequences of its action. The removal process is quite simple, because it can be executed even with making use of Microsoft Defender – security program that is available on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, because of its substantial resources utilization, as well as some errors that can be critical for some types of individuals, Defender is often disabled by the users, so its utilization is probably impossible. In addition, various trojan viruses are able to disable the embedded antivirus. It is better to make use of the separated program that will not have such vulnerabilities.

I’d advise you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven anti-malware device that will undoubtedly eliminate the viruses from your PC and create an impenetrable shield with a Proactive protection feature. However, let’s handle Ethicsage adware initially.

Removing Ethicsage 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 Ethicsage 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 ensure that your web browser will be connected the appropriate DNS while connecting to the site you need. Create a text file named “hosts” on your desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following content3:

# 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 the things much harder to restore, especially without the anti-malware program. Most of adware variations that are utilized to show you the Ethicsage pop-up promotions are changing the deep browser setups, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to fix your browser settings after your system was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly collapse quickly. In certain cases, you will see no crash, however, significant lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 secs, and after that it will be back to the normal, up until you try 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 Ethicsage Pop-ups?

Name: Ethicsage

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