Gainfulsurvey.top Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Gainfulsurvey.top pop-up notifications may show up out of the blue, covering the material of the site you went to or opening your web browser when you don’t wish it to be opened.

Clicking on the Gainfulsurvey.top advertisement can lead to the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the guideline of Gainfulsurvey.top popups clearing in various manners, as well as examining your computer for additional viruses presence.

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What are Gainfulsurvey.top pop-ups?

Gainfulsurvey.top popups are a consequence of adware presence. Adware is a sort of malware that shows you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which produces a massive amount of revenue for adware representatives. These promotions might consist of explicit material, or have a link to harmful content/website, considering that adware maintainers have no purpose to examine the goodness of the web content they are going to show – their single target is money.

Gainfulsurvey.top push notification

Gainfulsurvey.top push notification.

Pop-up advertising itself is a very good, affordable and really efficient marketing instrument1. It allows the seller to attach the customers’ interest to their website, as well as the buyers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they intend to buy. When the person will get a pop-up notification that the TV set he desires to buy is offered at the online store he/she checked out previously with a 15% discount, one will definitely use this chance and get it. Considering the extremely low cost for the popups and their targeting, such a marketing method is a favorite thing among the marketing departments of large online retail stores.

Nonetheless, such a successful strategy could not be missed by malware creators. Ability to demonstrate the popup ads by force to the victims of malware invasion is an excellent basis for malicious tricks with the popup promotions. And Gainfulsurvey.top ads is among hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a info for the Gainfulsurvey.top site
SiteGainfulsurvey.top
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
Infection TypeAdware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address172.67.70.156
SymptomsAnnoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behaviorMekickcold, Infodefenceguard, Brandpromod2
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Gainfulsurvey.top virus?

There are a lot of methods of becoming contaminated by the adware that lead to the Gainfulsurvey.top popups tornado. A lion’s part of this virus incidents is after the free software or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Freeware can likewise be downloaded from the official website, and the adware is presented as a legit bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A number of people oftentimes make use of the unreliable programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, different utilities that are free, and even hacked programs. All of these sorts of applications are dangerous, because it is extremely simple to include a Gainfulsurvey.top malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

Gainfulsurvey.top popup malware can likewise be hidden in the advertisement somewhere on the strange site. Such sites are generally loaded with intense and blinking advertisements, and their owners typically permit any promos to be placed on their web page. For this reason, clicking on such banners is a shot in the dark: only the ad provider knows what will occur when you click this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you can additionally receive something much more threatening, like ransomware or coin miner; the big share of coin miners distribution is exactly after the malicious promotions.

People dislike popups

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

Potentially unwanted programs, like Gainfulsurvey.top pop-up virus can initiate a lot of problems on your personal computer. Distracting is not the only problem – pop-up notifications can display you the promotions, where you are offered to download one more unknown program, or “a effective anti-malware tool”. Scareware is often distributed with the last motto. Potentially undesirable programs, in turn, may have spyware functionality. And it is pretty hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a good one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and fake antiviruses, popup-related banners are also exploited as a distribution way by various trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such malware is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not interacting with these promotions, they can be clicked by whoever who also uses your personal computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to deal with it without information loss. It is recommended to remove the viruses with anti-malware programs as soon as possible.

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

The manual of Gainfulsurvey.top adware elimination contains 2 parts. First, we need to exterminate the malware, and then repair the consequences of its activity. The elimination procedure is quite simple, because it can be executed even with making use of Microsoft Defender – anti-malware program that is available on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. Nonetheless, as a result of its significant resources usage, along with some defects that can be crucial for some types of users, Defender is often disabled by the users, so its usage is likely impossible. Furthermore, a variety of trojan viruses can shut off the embedded antivirus. It is better to make use of the separated program that will not have such weakness.

I would certainly suggest you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven security tool that will definitely erase the malware from your computer and also create an impenetrable shield with a Proactive protection function. But let’s take care of Gainfulsurvey.top adware first.

Removing Gainfulsurvey.top 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 Gainfulsurvey.top 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 browser will definitely connect the appropriate DNS while connecting to the site you want. Make a text file named “hosts” on your desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following text3:

# 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 problem that makes the things a lot harder to repair, especially without the anti-malware program. Most of adware versions that are used to show you the Gainfulsurvey.top pop-up ads are adjusting the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to change your browser settings after your computer was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly crash soon. In certain cases, you will see no crash, but significant lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 seconds, and then it will be back to the normal, until you attempt 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 Gainfulsurvey.top Pop-ups?

Name: Gainfulsurvey.top

Description: Gainfulsurvey.top - 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 Gainfulsurvey.top push notifications?” or “why do Gainfulsurvey.top pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Gainfulsurvey.top 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 review and also the reasons why I recommend 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.

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