Gadsonline Pop-up Virus — How to Remove Unwanted Ads?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Gadsonline pop-up advertisements appear when you do not expect, disturbing and irritating you. Nonetheless, that is slightly more than simple pop-ups – their origins is purely malignant, and they can introduce other malware to your device. In this article, I will show you the guide how to remove Gadsonline pop-up notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Gadsonline push notifications will be useless at best. At worst, the web pages it can throw you to can introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups may also promote fake online 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 Gadsonline pop-ups?

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 advertisements and Gadsonline pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Common pop-up ads are offered for you to enable with a benevolent purpose – notify you about the new posts, discounts and so on. It is a useful thing to help your site to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested users to have the best price.

Brief description of the Gadsonline.com pop-up ads:
NameGadsonline.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address188.114.96.3
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorDajens, News, Lp
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Gadsonline pop-ups, as opposed, are related to unlegit web pages. You will commonly observe the proposition to enable them following the redirection from another site. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless they throw you into such a dubious place. In this case, enabling pop-up advertisements is offered under the guise of the anti-bot filtering. In other cases, the sites may refuse to show you the content unless you turn on these pop-up notifications. These theses should already be the red flag, as websites commonly feature a different anti-bot mechanism. Seeing this offer is a reason to leave the page right away. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not see the web page – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up notifications.

Gadsonline push notification

Gadsonline push notification.

How does this work?

The vast majority of browsers support turning on push notifications from websites. Sites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content of their choice. It can be a promotion of the product or a page published on this particular site, or a promotion of their partner page. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but clicking it will throw you to website Y – because a link to the latter was built in.

Crooks rely on this ability in their approach to earn money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing the pop-ups, and after that just spread hundreds of promotions of other crooks they have a deal with. As you can suppose, no legit companies will contract with fraudsters. All the Gadsonline push ads you may see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same user may get into a trap of several pop-up spamming websites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It generally provides a miserable payment for one viewer, but when you have hundreds of users and show them hundreds of ads every day – that is a much bigger sum. Despite the majority of these banners giving no result at all, it may still give all the parties a lot of profit.

Are Gadsonline pop-ups dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they may look safe – just a blinking window that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-up advertisements. Gadsonline.com site is ruled by fraudsters, who intentionally throw tons of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can launch sporadic pop-ups into a hurricane of promotions. For weak computers, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all troubles these pop-up notifications carry.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing that touches illegal ads, Gadsonline pop-up advertisements don’t have legit offers. Even though crooks make the banners similar to ones from well-known retailers, the web page these ads will throw you to are completely different. And these pages can 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, Gadsonline pop-up notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Gadsonline pop-ups?

Fortunately, Gadsonline pop-up notifications removal is pretty easy. They reside in the web browser and cannot conceal themselves among system files. Nevertheless, as I stated above, some pop-ups may promote malicious programs to your computer. It is nearly impossible to predict all of the cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is inconvenient. Thus, after disabling the push notifications it is recommended to use anti-malware software. That is especially recommended if you have never allowed push notifications, but they still appeared. That may be a sign of malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both system recovery and malware checkup purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and multi-component detection system.

First of all, 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 site 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 Gadsonline 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 Gadsonline Pop-ups?

Name: Gadsonline

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