Fast-update pop-up notifications appear when you do not expect, distracting and irritating you. However, they are slightly more than annoying notifications – their essence is purely malignant, and they may bring other malicious stuff to your system. In this post, I will show you how to remove Fast-update pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.
Any time you interact with Fast-update pop-up notifications will be useless at best. At worst, the sites it can throw you to can introduce malware to your system. These push notifications may also advertise fake online 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.
What are Fast-update 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 advertisements and Fast-update pop-ups is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal pop-up ads are offered for you to enable on different sites with a straightforward purpose – keep you aware about the latest publications, 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.
Short summary of the Fast-update.com pop-up ads:
Name | Fast-update.com |
Hosting | AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc. United States, San Francisco |
IP Address | 104.21.33.84 |
Malware type | Adware1 |
Effect | Unwanted pop-up advertisements |
Hazard level | Medium |
Malware source | Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites |
Similar behavior | Iamadsnews, News, Dabins |
Removal method | To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC |
Fast-update pop-ups, as opposed, are related to unlegit websites. You will generally witness the proposition to turn them on after a redirection from another website. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless it throws you to such a dubious place. In this case, enabling pop-up notifications is served as the anti-DDoS check-up. In other cases, the web pages may deny showing you the contents unless you enable these pop-up ads. These requirements should already raise suspicion, as websites commonly have a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Seeing such an offer is a reason to skip the page doubtlessly. Sometimes, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the website – the sole page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-ups.
How does this work?
The vast majority of web browsers support enabling pop-ups from websites. Sites, on the other hand, may send notifications with the content they like. It may be an advertisement of the page listed for sale on this particular site, as well as an ad of their partner page. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but opening it will throw you to site Y – because a link to that website was embedded.
Crooks bear on this ability in their attempt to gain money using illegal advertising. They trick victims into allowing them to show the banners, and then just spread numerous banners of anyone they have a deal with. As you may suppose, no image-caring companies will have a business with fraudsters. All the Fast-update popups you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same user may get into a trap of several pop-up spamming websites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.
The ads these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It generally provides a negligible payment for one viewer, but when you have a huge number of users and make it hundreds of times every day – that is a way bigger sum. Even though most of these banners are ineffective, it may still give all the participants a lot of money.
Are Fast-update pop-up advertisements dangerous?
Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look harmless – just a colourful pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the things this window promotes differ drastically from what you used to see in push notifications. Fast-update.com web page is controlled by fraudsters, who intentionally show tons of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can make sporadic pop-up advertisements into a hurricane of ads. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But troubles are not over at this point.
As any other thing that touches illegal advertising, Fast-update pop-up ads don’t have legit deals to offer. Even though hackers make the ads looking similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the site these ads 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-ups 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, Fast-update 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 Fast-update pop-ups?
Fortunately, Fast-update pop-up advertisements removal is not very complicated. They reside in the web browser and cannot hide themselves in the system. However, as I pointed out before, some pop-up ads can deliver malicious software to your computer. It is hard to predict all of the cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a bad idea. Thus, after getting rid of the pop-up notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that if you have never allowed pop-ups, and they still appeared. This situation can be a sign of adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware scanning purposes, because of its abilities of system recovery and multi-component detection system.
First of all, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to do in both manual and automatic manner. 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 may 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 web page 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 Fast-update 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 Fast-update Pop-ups?
Name: Fast-update
Description: Fast-update - 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 Fast-update.com push notifications?” or “why do Fast-update.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Fast-update 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.