Extrafield pop-ups appear when you do not expect, distracting and irritating you. Still, that is much more than annoying pop-ups – their essence is surely malicious, and they may introduce other malware to your device. In this article, I will guide you on how to remove Extrafield pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.
Any interaction with Extrafield push notifications will be ineffective at best. In worst case scenario, the pages it can open can introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups can also promote fake online 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 Extrafield push 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-up notifications and Extrafield pop-ups is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal push notifications are offered for you to enable with a straightforward purpose – notify you about the new publications, discounts and so on. It is an effective approach to help your site to keep visitors and help the interested users to have the best deal.
Brief description of the Extrafield.com pop-ups:
Name | Extrafield.com |
Hosting | AS16509 Amazon.com, Inc. United States, Hilliard |
IP Address | 3.130.204.160 |
Malware type | Adware1 |
Effect | Unwanted pop-up advertisements |
Hazard level | Medium |
Malware source | Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites |
Similar behavior | Meeethuhesurvey, News, Hubtowpro |
Removal method | To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC |
Extrafield pop-ups, as opposed, are related to less legit sites. You will commonly witness the proposition to turn them on after a redirection from another website. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless they throw you to such a dubious place. At that point, turning on pop-up advertisements is offered as the anti-bot check. In other cases, the sites can refuse to show you the content unless you enable these pop-up ads. These theses should already be the red flag, as sites commonly feature a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Spectating such an offer should be the reason to skip the website doubtlessly. Sometimes, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the website – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up notifications.
How does this work?
The majority of web browsers support enabling pop-ups from sites. Websites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content they want. It may be a promotion of the page published on this particular site, as well as a promotion of their partner page. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but clicking it will direct you to website Y – because a link to that website was added.
Cybercriminals bear on this feature in their attempt to earn money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing them to show the banners, and after that just spread numerous promotions of other crooks they contract with. As you may suppose, no benevolent companies will contract with fraudsters. All the Extrafield push ads you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same victim can get into a trap of 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 miserable payment for one person, but when you can send ads to a huge number of users and make it hundreds of times each day – that is a way bigger sum. Despite the majority of these banners are ineffective, it may still give all the participants a lot of profit.
Are Extrafield push notifications dangerous?
Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look safe – just a blinking window that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you used to see in pop-up notifications. Extrafield.com web page is controlled by crooks, who deliberately show hundreds of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any common sense and can launch sporadic pop-up ads into a storm of ads. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all troubles these pop-up notifications carry.
As with any other thing that touches illegal ads, Extrafield pop-ups don’t have legit offers. Even though crooks make the ads similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the web page these banners will throw you to are completely different. And these pages can 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 advertisements 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, Extrafield pop-up notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.
How to remove Extrafield pop-ups?
Fortunately, Extrafield pop-up notifications removal is pretty easy. They parasite in the browser and can’t conceal themselves on a disk. Nonetheless, as I stated above, some pop-up advertisements may deliver malicious software to your system. It is nearly impossible to predict all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a poor idea. Thus, after getting rid of the pop-up ads the best option is to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended if you have never allowed pop-up notifications, and they still appeared. That may be a sign of malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware scanning 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 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 Extrafield 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 Extrafield Pop-ups?
Name: Extrafield
Description: Extrafield - 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 Extrafield.com push notifications?” or “why do Extrafield.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Extrafield 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.