Filecrypt.co Notification Removal — How to Fix Your Browser

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Filecrypt.co pop-ups appear when you do not expect, disturbing and annoying you. Nonetheless, that is way more than simple pop-up ads – their origins is purely malicious, and they can introduce other malicious stuff to your system. In this post, I will show you the guide how to remove Filecrypt.co pop-up notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Filecrypt.co pop-up advertisements will be useless at best. At worst, the web pages it can open may introduce malware to your system. These push notifications can also advertise 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.

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What are Filecrypt.co 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 push notifications and Filecrypt.co pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal pop-up ads are offered for you to enable on different sites with a understandable purpose – notify you about the latest publications, 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 price.

Short summary of the Filecrypt.co pop-ups:
NameFilecrypt.co
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address104.21.2.130
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorAntivirusscanfix, Wodpw, Gleemsub
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Filecrypt.co pop-up notifications, on the other hand, are related to unlegit sites. You will commonly see the offer to enable them following the redirection from another website. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless they throw you to such a dubious place. In this case, enabling pop-up advertisements is offered as the anti-DDoS check. Alternatively, the websites may refuse to show you the content unless you apply these pop-up ads. These theses should raise suspicion, as sites generally feature a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Seeing this demand is a reason to skip the page right away. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the site – the sole page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up ads.

Filecrypt.co push notification

Filecrypt.co push notification.

How does this work?

Most of browsers support turning on push notifications from sites. Sites, on the other hand, may send notifications with the content they like. It may be a promotion of the product listed on this particular website, as well as a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but clicking it will direct you to site Y – because a link to the latter was embedded.

Scoundrels rely on this feature in their attempt to earn money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing them to show the banners, and then just spread hundreds of promotions of anyone they contract with. As you may suppose, no image-caring organisations will have a business with fraudsters. All the Filecrypt.co push ads you may see lead to other fraudulent sites. In some cases, the same user may be trapped by several pop-up spamming sites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these rascals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a negligible payment for one person, but when you have hundreds of users and show them hundreds of ads every day – that is a much bigger sum. Despite most of these banners giving no result at all, it can still give all the participants a lot of money.

Are Filecrypt.co pop-up notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they may look non-threatening – just a colourful window 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 ads. Filecrypt.co web page is ruled by fraudsters, who deliberately show hundreds and thousands of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic pop-ups into a hurricane of ads. For weak computers, that may be enough to make the system slower. But problems are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing related to illegal ads, Filecrypt.co push notifications lack legit deals to offer. Even though hackers make the banners looking similar to ones from well-known retailers, the site 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 ads 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, Filecrypt.co pop-up advertisements are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Filecrypt.co pop-ups?

Fortunately, Filecrypt.co pop-up ads removal is pretty easy. They parasite in the web browser and can’t hide themselves among system files. Nevertheless, as I pointed out before, some pop-up notifications may introduce malicious software to your system. It is hard to predict all of the cases, and manual malware removal is inconvenient. Therefore, after disabling the push notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended in the case when you have never allowed push notifications, but they still appeared. That may point at adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both system recovery and malware scanning and removal purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and superb detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to do 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 Filecrypt.co 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 Filecrypt.co Pop-ups?

Name: Filecrypt.co

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