Remove Follokot Pop-up Ads — How to Fix Gude

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Follokot pop-up notices may show up unexpectedly, covering the post of the site you visited or opening your web browser when you don’t need it to be opened.

Clicking the Follokot ad may cause the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this guide, you will see the guide of Follokot popups clearing in a couple of manners, as well as examining your system for extra malware presence.

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What are Follokot pop-ups?

Follokot popups are an outcome of adware activity. Adware is a type of malware that shows you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click promotions, which creates a major amount of earnings for adware suppliers. These ads might contain explicit composition, or have a web link to malevolent content/website, because adware maintainers have no purpose to inspect the goodness of the content they are going to reveal – their single target is cash.

Follokot push notification

Follokot push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is an excellent, affordable and very efficient marketing tool1. It allows the vendor to link the customers’ attention to their website, and the buyers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they wish to buy. When the person will get a pop-up notification that the TV set he desires to purchase is offered at the online store he/she saw previously with a 15% discount, one will certainly use this opportunity and buy it. Considering the incredibly low price for the popups and their targeting, such a marketing tool is a much-loved thing among the marketing departments of large internet sellers.

Nevertheless, such a successful strategy could not be missed by malware creators. Potential to show the popup ads forcibly to the people of malware invasion is an ideal basis for evil-minded manipulations with the popup ads. And Follokot.space advertisements is among hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a summary for the Follokot
Site Follokot.space
Hosting AS14618 Amazon.com, Inc.
United States, Ashburn
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 54.144.3.29
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior Choupsee, News, Welftheraz
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Follokot virus?

There are a lot of ways of getting infected by the adware that cause the Follokot popups storm. A lion’s part of this computer virus incidents is after the free software or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Free software may additionally be downloaded from the official web page, and the adware is provided as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A number of individuals often use the unreliable programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, different tools that are free, and even hacked programs. All of these types of software are unsafe, because it is extremely simple to build in a Follokot malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Follokot popup malware can likewise be concealed in the promotion somewhere on the unusual site. Such web pages are typically loaded with colorful and blinking advertisements, and their proprietors usually permit any kind of promos to be placed on their page. Thus, clicking such banners is a risky thing: only the advertisement contractor realizes what will occur when you press this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you can also receive something far more risky, like ransomware or coin miner; the large 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 undesirable programs, like Follokot pop-up virus may cause a lot of different troubles on your PC. Distracting is not the single problem – pop-ups may present you the ads, where you are offered to download another strange program, or “a effective security tool”. Scareware is often spread under the last motto. Potentially undesirable applications, in turn, can have spyware functions. And it is quite hard to distinguish the undesirable app from a normal one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and dubious antiviruses, popup-related banners are also exploited as a spreading way by different trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such malware is 100% unwanted, and can cost you hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not tapping these banners, they may be clicked by whoever who also makes use of your PC – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without information loss. It is recommended to eliminate the viruses with anti-malware programs as soon as possible.

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

The tutorial of Follokot adware removal contains 2 parts. Initially, we need to exterminate the malware, and after that take care of the effects of its action. The elimination process is really simple, since it can be executed even with using Microsoft Defender – anti-malware tool that is available on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, because of its large resources usage, as well as some defects that may be serious for some categories of individuals, Defender is oftentimes turned off by the users, so its use is most likely impossible. Moreover, a wide range of trojan viruses have the ability to shut off the embedded antivirus. It is much better to make use of the separated program that will not have such weakness.

I’d advise you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven anti-malware device that will certainly wipe out the malware from your system and also make an invulnerable shield with a Proactive protection feature. But let’s manage Follokot adware first.

Removing Follokot 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 Follokot 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 web browsers are reset, you need to make sure that your browser will definitely connect the right DNS while connecting to the site you want. Make a text file titled “hosts” on your computer’s desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following lines3:

# 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 issue that makes things much more difficult to repair, specifically without the anti-malware software. The majority of adware versions that are used to show you the Follokot pop-up promotions are adjusting the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to change your browser settings after your PC was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly collapse soon. In certain cases, you will see no crash, but 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, till you try to open settings one more time.

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 Follokot Pop-ups?

Name: Follokot

Description: Follokot - 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 Follokot.space push notifications?” or “why do Follokot.space pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Follokot 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 advertisements on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware review and the reasons why I recommend it for malware removal.
  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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