Free Captcha Virus — How to remove pop-ups?

Free Captcha Virus (Freecaptcha.top) can appear unexpectedly, covering the post of the site you checked or opening your browser when you do not desire it to be opened.

Clicking the Freecaptcha.top advertisement can trigger the injection of different malware or unwanted programs. In this post, you will see the manual of Freecaptcha.top popups removal in a couple of ways, and also examining your personal computer for additional malware presence.

What are Freecaptcha.top pop-ups?

Freecaptcha.top popups are an effect of adware presence. Adware is a kind of malware that demonstrates to you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click promotions, which creates a substantial volume of income for adware distributors. These promotions might consist of explicit content, or have a web link to malicious content/website, because adware maintainers have no reason to check the goodness of the web content they are going to show – their solitary target is money.

Freecaptcha.top push notification.

Pop-up promotions itself is a good, affordable and really efficient marketing tool¹. It enables the seller to attach the buyers’ interest to their website, as well as the buyers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they want to purchase. When the person will get a pop-up notification that the TV set he wishes to purchase is provided at the online shop he/she checked out previously with a 15% discount, one will certainly use this chance and get it. Taking into consideration the extremely small cost for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising instrument is a favourite thing amidst the advertising teams of huge internet stores.

However, such a rewarding scheme could not be missed by malware creators. Potential to demonstrate the popup ads forcibly to the people of malware attack is a great basis for malevolent manipulations with the popup ads. And Freecaptcha.top promotions is just one of hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a short info for the Freecaptcha.top site

How have I got the Freecaptcha.top virus?

There are a number of methods of becoming contaminated by the adware that create the Freecaptcha.top popups tornado. A lion’s part of this malware instances is after the free software or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Freeware can also be downloaded from the main web page, and the adware is provided as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. Plenty of people frequently use unreliable programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, a wide range of utilities that are free, or even hacked programs. All of these kinds of programs are unsafe, due to the fact that it is quite easy to build in a Freecaptcha.top malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algorithm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

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

How can I get rid of Freecaptcha.top pop-up advertisements?

The guide of Freecaptcha.top adware elimination contains 2 sections. First, we need to exterminate the malware, and afterwards fix the consequences of its action. The elimination procedure is really simple, since it can be performed even with using Microsoft Defender – security software that is present on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. However, due to its large resources consumption, along with some errors that may be crucial for some types of users, Defender is frequently disabled by the users, so its utilization is likely impossible. Moreover, a variety of trojan viruses are able to disable the embedded antivirus. It is much better to make use of the separated program that will not have such weakness.

• 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.

• When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Freecaptcha.top malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.

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. 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. In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option :

After choosing this option, you will see the next message :

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 browser will definitely be connected the proper DNS while connecting to the web page you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following content³:

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 a lot harder to repair, specifically without the anti-malware program. The majority of adware variations that are utilized to show you the Freecaptcha.top pop-up advertisements 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 infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will collapse quickly. In certain cases, you will see no crash, but huge lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 seconds, and after that it will be back to the typical, till you attempt to open settings once more.

1. More about pop-up advertisements on Wikipedia.
2. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.