Remove Extension Pop-up Ads — How to Fix Gude

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Extension pop-up notifications appear when you do not expect, disturbing and annoying you. Still, they are much more than simple pop-up ads – their origins is cleanly malicious, and they may install other malicious stuff to your device. In this post, I will show you how to remove Extension pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Extension pop-up advertisements will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the pages it can throw you to can introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups may also promote fake shopping sites which will take your money and payment info. The latter generally ends up with losing all the money you have on the exposed card.

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What are Extension pop-ups?

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 Extension notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal push notifications are offered for you to enable with a legitimate purpose – notify you about the new posts, goods for sale and so on. It is an effective approach to help your website to keep visitors and help the interested visitors to have the best deal.

Brief description of the Extensionco.com pop-ups:
NameExtensionco.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address172.67.184.128
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorWounden, Abdoser, News
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Extension push notifications, on the other hand, are related to unlegit web pages. You will generally observe the proposition to enable them following the redirection from another website. Redirects are OK unless they throw you to such a questionable place. In this case, enabling push notifications is served under the guise of the anti-bot check-up. Alternatively, the websites can deny showing you the content unless you apply these pop-ups. These theses should already raise suspicion, as sites generally have a different anti-bot mechanism. Spectating such an offer is a reason to leave the page right away. Sometimes, even when you click “Allow”, you will not see the website – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up advertisements.

Extension push notification

Extension push notification.

How does it work?

The vast majority of browsers support turning on push notifications from websites. Sites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content of their choice. It may be a promotion of the page published on this website, as well as an ad of their partner page. As a result, you can see the push notification from site X, but interacting with it will throw you to site Y – because a referral link to that website was embedded.

Scoundrels rely on this feature in their attempt to earn money using illegal advertising. They trick users into turning on pop-ups, and after that just spread numerous ads of other crooks they have a deal with. As you may suppose, no legit organisations will contract with fraudsters. All the Extension popups you may see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same victim can be trapped by several pop-up spamming sites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a miserable payment for one view, but when you have hundreds of victims 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 may still bring all the parties a lot of profit.

Are Extension pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they can look safe – just a blinking pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the things this window promotes differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-up advertisements. Extensionco.com web page is controlled by crooks, who intentionally spread hundreds of malicious 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 systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all troubles these pop-up ads carry.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing related to illegal advertising, Extension pop-up notifications lack legit offers. Even when crooks make the ads looking similar to ones from well-known retailers, the website these ads 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 push 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, Extension pop-up ads are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Extension pop-ups?

Fortunately, Extension pop-up advertisements removal is not very complicated. They sit in the browser and can’t hide themselves in the system. Nonetheless, as I told before, some pop-up advertisements can introduce malware to your system. It is hard to describe all of the cases, and manual malware removal is a poor idea. Therefore, after disabling the pop-up notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. I’d especially recommend that if you have never allowed pop-up ads, and they still appeared. That can point at malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both system recovery and malware scanning purposes, thanks to its abilities of system recovery and advanced detection system.

Initially, 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.

Tools tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

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.

Reset Browser Settings tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

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:
  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 browser will connect the right DNS while connecting to the website 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 Extension 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.

GridinSoft Anti-Malware during the scan 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).

GridinSoft scan finished

How to Remove Extension Pop-ups?

Name: Extension

Description: Extension - 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 Extensionco.com push notifications?” or “why do Extensionco.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Extension 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 this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
  2. 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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