Gadscare Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Gadscare pop-up advertisements appear out of the blue, distracting and irritating you. Nonetheless, that is way more than simple pop-up ads – their essence is surely malicious, and they can bring other malware to your device. In this article, I will show you how to remove Gadscare push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Gadscare pop-up advertisements will be ineffective at best. At worst, the websites it can throw you to can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up notifications can also advertise fake shopping sites 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 Gadscare pop-up advertisements?

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 notifications and Gadscare notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Common pop-up advertisements are offered for you to enable on different sites with a understandable purpose – keep you aware about the fresh articles, discounts and so on. It is a useful thing to help your site to keep visitors and help the interested visitors to have the best deal.

Brief description of the Gadscare.com pop-ups:
NameGadscare.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address172.67.133.166
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorGojogo, Vansooposurvey, Fastincognitomode
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Gadscare pop-up ads, in contrast, have a deal with untrustworthy websites. You will generally witness the proposition to enable them after a redirection from another website. Redirects are OK unless they throw you into such a dubious place. At that point, enabling pop-up ads is offered under the guise of the anti-bot filtering. Alternatively, the sites can refuse to show you the content unless you turn on these push notifications. These demands should raise suspicion, as websites commonly feature a different anti-bot mechanism. Spectating this demand is a reason to skip the site right away. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not get to the website – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the push notifications.

Gadscare push notification

Gadscare push notification.

How does this work?

Most of browsers support enabling pop-ups from websites. Sites, on the other hand, can send out notifications with the content they want. It may be an advertisement of the page listed on this website, as well as an ad of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but opening it will throw you to website Y – because a link to that website was added.

Cyber burglars rely on this ability in their approach to gain money using illegal advertising. They trick victims into turning on pop-ups, and then just spread hundreds of promotions of other crooks they contract with. As you may suppose, no normal companies will contract with fraudsters. All the Gadscare popups you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same user can be trapped by several pop-up spamming web pages, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The promotions these rascals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a miserable commission for one viewer, but when you can send ads to a huge number of victims and make it hundreds of times every day – that is a much more significant sum. Despite the majority of such banners giving no result at all, it can still bring all the participants a lot of profit.

Are Gadscare pop-up ads dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they can look non-threatening – just a blinking pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the things this window promotes differ sharply from what you generally see in pop-up ads. Gadscare.com web page is ruled by crooks, who intentionally throw hundreds of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any common sense and can launch sporadic pop-up notifications into a storm of banners. For weak computers, 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 that touches illegal ads, Gadscare pop-up ads lack legit deals to offer. Even though hackers make the ads similar to ones from well-known retailers, the web page 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 push 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, Gadscare pop-ups are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Gadscare pop-ups?

Fortunately, Gadscare pop-up ads removal is pretty easy. They parasite in the browser and cannot hide themselves among system files. However, as I told before, some pop-up notifications may promote malicious programs to your computer. It is hard to show all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a bad idea. For that reason, after disabling the push notifications it is recommended to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that if you have never allowed pop-up ads, and they still appeared. This situation can be a sign of malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware checkup purposes, because of its abilities of system recovery and multi-layer detection system.

First and foremost, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in both manual and automatic manner. 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 may 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 Gadscare 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 Gadscare Pop-ups?

Name: Gadscare

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