FullDesktopControl Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
FullDesktopControl pop-up advertisements appear out of the blue, detracting and irritating you. However, they are slightly more than annoying pop-ups – their essence is clearly malicious, and they may install other malicious stuff to your device. In this article, I will guide you on how to remove FullDesktopControl pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with FullDesktopControl push notifications will be ineffective at best. In worst case scenario, the pages it can open may introduce malware to your system. These pop-up notifications may also advertise fake 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 FullDesktopControl 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 ads and FullDesktopControl notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal push notifications are offered for you to enable on different sites with a benevolent purpose – keep you aware about the new posts, discounts and so on. It is a useful tool to help your website to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested users to have the best deal.

Brief description of the Fulldesktopcontrol.com pop-ups:
Name Fulldesktopcontrol.com
Hosting AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address 104.21.21.36
Malware type Adware1
Effect Unwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard level Medium
Malware source Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behavior Casualdatingmeetup, News, Towimg
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

FullDesktopControl pop-up advertisements, in contrast, have a deal with untrustworthy sites. You will commonly observe the offer to enable them following the 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 advertisements is offered under the guise of the anti-DDoS check. In other cases, the websites may refuse to show you the contents unless you turn on these pop-up advertisements. These demands should raise suspicion, as websites commonly feature a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Seeing this demand is a reason to leave the site doubtlessly. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not get to the site – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up notifications.

FullDesktopControl push notification

FullDesktopControl push notification.

How does it work?

The vast majority of browsers support enabling pop-ups from websites. Websites, on the other hand, can send out notifications with the content they like. It can be an advertisement of the product listed for sale on this site, as well as a promotion of their partner page. As a result, you can see the pop-up from site X, but interacting with it will redirect you to site Y – because a link to that website was added.

Scoundrels bear on this ability in their attempt to gain money through advertising. They trick victims into turning on pop-ups, and after that just spread numerous ads of anyone they contract with. As you can suppose, no image-caring companies will have a deal with fraudsters. All the FullDesktopControl popups you may see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same user can get into a trap of multiple pop-up spamming web pages, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The promotions these rascals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a negligible pay for one view, but when you have a huge number of users and make it hundreds of times each day – that is a much bigger sum. Even though most of such ads are ineffective, it can still bring all the parties a lot of money.

Are FullDesktopControl pop-ups dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look harmless – just a colourful window that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the things this window promotes differ sharply from what you generally see in pop-ups. Fulldesktopcontrol.com site is ruled by crooks, who intentionally show hundreds and thousands of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can launch sporadic pop-up ads into a hurricane of ads. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But troubles are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing related to illegal ads, FullDesktopControl pop-up advertisements lack legit deals to offer. Even when hackers make the ads similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the site these ads will throw you to are completely different. And these pages may 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 notifications 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, FullDesktopControl push notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove FullDesktopControl pop-ups?

Fortunately, FullDesktopControl pop-ups removal is pretty easy. They parasite in the web browser and can’t conceal themselves among system files. Nonetheless, as I pointed out before, some pop-up ads can deliver malicious software to your system. It is hard to predict all of the cases, and manual malware removal is inconvenient. For that reason, 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 clicked “Allow” to pop-up ads, and they still appeared. That may be a sign of adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware scanning and removal purposes, thanks to its system recovery functionality and multi-component detection system.

First and foremost, 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 may 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 FullDesktopControl 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 FullDesktopControl Pop-ups?

Name: FullDesktopControl

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