Remove Fossilsafety.store Virus — How to Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Fossilsafety.store pop-up alerts can appear out of the blue, covering the content of the website you went to or opening your web browser when you don’t desire it to be opened.

Clicking on the Fossilsafety.store advertisement may result in the injection of other malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the manual of Fossilsafety.store popups clearing in several ways, as well as checking your system for additional viruses presence.

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What are Fossilsafety.store pop-ups?

Fossilsafety.store popups are an effect of adware action. Adware is a type of malware that suggests you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click advertisements, which creates a large amount of revenue for adware suppliers. These advertisements might contain sometimes shocking composition, or have a link to harmful content/website, due to the fact that adware maintainers have no reason to inspect the goodness of the content they are going to reveal – their single target is cash.

Fossilsafety.store push notification

Fossilsafety.store push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is an excellent, low-priced and also extremely productive advertising solution1. It allows the vendor to link the buyers’ attention to their site, and the customers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they want to buy. When the person will receive a pop-up notification that the TV set he likes to purchase is offered at the online store he/she checked out previously with a 15% price cut, one will definitely use this chance and get it. Considering the exceptionally low price for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising and marketing method is a favourite thing among the marketing departments of large internet retail stores.

However, such a profitable system could not be missed by malware creators. Ability to show the popup ads by force to the victims of malware invasion is an ideal basis for evil-minded adjustments with the popup ads. And Fossilsafety.store advertisements is just one of hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a details for the Fossilsafety.store site
SiteFossilsafety.store
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
Infection TypeAdware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address188.114.97.3
SymptomsAnnoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behaviorTrcklinkwinkwink, Itiontowrit, News
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Fossilsafety.store virus?

There are a huge amount of methods of getting infected by the adware that lead to the Fossilsafety.store popups tornado. A lion’s part of this malware instances is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Free software may additionally be downloaded from the official website, and the adware is supplied as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A lot of people frequently use the unreliable programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, various apps that are free, or perhaps hacked programs. All of these types of applications are risky, because it is very simple to build in a Fossilsafety.store malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Fossilsafety.store popup virus can additionally be concealed in the ad somewhere on the odd website. Such sites are in most cases packed with bright and blinking ads, and their owners often permit any promotions to be published on their web page. Hence, clicking on such banners is a risky thing: only the advertisement provider knows what will happen when you click this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or unwanted programs, you can likewise get something much more risky, like ransomware or coin miner; the large share of coin miners distribution is exactly after the malicious advertisements.

People dislike popups

The statistic shows that people dislike popup advertising more than other types of promotions

Potentially undesirable programs, like Fossilsafety.store pop-up virus may provoke a lot of troubles on your personal computer. Distracting is not the only problem – pop-ups can display you the banners, where you are offered to download another unknown program, or “a amazing security tool”. Scareware is usually distributed under the last slogun. Potentially undesirable programs, in turn, may 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 PUPs and fake antiviruses, popup-related promotions are also exploited as a distribution method by different trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such malware is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And even if you are not tapping these ads, they may be clicked by whoever who also uses your PC – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to deal with it without data loss. It is recommended to wipe out the viruses with antivirus applications as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Fossilsafety.store pop-up advertisements?

The guide of Fossilsafety.store adware clearing consists of 2 sections. Initially, we need to eliminate the malware, and afterwards fix the consequences of its activity. The removal process is pretty simple, because it can be performed even with using Microsoft Defender – security program that is available on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nonetheless, as a result of its large resources utilization, along with some failures that can be critical for some groups of individuals, Defender is oftentimes turned off by the users, so its use is likely impossible. Moreover, a variety of trojan viruses have the ability to turn off the embedded antivirus. It is much better to use the separated program that will not have such weakness.

I would certainly advise you to use Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven security tool that will undoubtedly eliminate the viruses from your system and also make an invulnerable cover with a Proactive protection function. But let’s take care of Fossilsafety.store adware first.

Removing Fossilsafety.store 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 Fossilsafety.store 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 ensure that your web browser will definitely be connected the accurate DNS while connecting to the website you need. Make a text file named “hosts” on your pc’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.

Nonetheless, there is one issue that makes things much harder to fix, particularly without the anti-malware program. A lot of adware variations that are used to show you the Fossilsafety.store pop-up advertisements are altering the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to fix your browser settings after your computer was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will collapse soon. Sometimes, you will see no crash, however, large lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 seconds, and afterwards it will be back to the typical, until 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 Fossilsafety.store Pop-ups?

Name: Fossilsafety.store

Description: Fossilsafety.store - 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 Fossilsafety.store push notifications?” or “why do Fossilsafety.store pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Fossilsafety.store 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 ads on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware overview and also the reasons why I suggest it for malware elimination.
  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.

One Response

  1. Zama September 19, 2022

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