Gawend.xyz Ads Removal Guide — Fix Push Notification

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Gawend.xyz pop-up advertisements appear when you do not expect, detracting and irritating you. However, that is much more than just notifications – their nature is cleanly malicious, and they can install other malicious stuff to your device. In this post, I will guide you on how to remove Gawend.xyz pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Gawend.xyz pop-up notifications will be useless at best. At worst, the web pages it can open may introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements may also advertise fake online 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 Gawend.xyz 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 Gawend.xyz pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal pop-up advertisements are offered for you to enable on different sites with a straightforward purpose – keep you aware about the latest publications, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful thing to help your website to keep visitors and help the interested users to have the best price.

Brief summary of the Gawend.xyz pop-ups:
NameGawend.xyz
HostingAS14061 DigitalOcean, LLC
United States, Santa Clara
IP Address147.182.255.121
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorExtrafield, Meeethuhesurvey, News
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Gawend.xyz pop-ups, on the other hand, are related to untrustworthy sites. You will generally witness the proposition to enable them following the redirection from another page. It’s OK to see redirects unless it throws you into such a questionable place. At that point, enabling pop-up advertisements is served under the guise of the anti-DDoS check. In other cases, the web pages may deny showing you the contents unless you turn on these push notifications. These theses should already be the red flag, as sites generally have a different anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing this demand is a reason to close the website doubtlessly. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the web page – the sole page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-ups.

Gawend.xyz push notification

Gawend.xyz push notification.

How does it work?

The majority of web browsers support enabling push notifications from websites. Sites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content they want. It may be an advertisement of the product posted on this particular website, or a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but clicking it will redirect you to website Y – because a link to the latter was built in.

Crooks rely on this ability in their approach to gain money using illegal advertising. They trick victims into allowing them to show the banners, and after that just spread numerous promotions of other crooks they contract with. As you may suppose, no normal organisations will contract with fraudsters. All the Gawend.xyz popups you may see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same user may be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming sites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The ads these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a negligible pay for one view, but when you have a huge number of users and make it hundreds of times every day – that is a way bigger sum. Despite the majority of these ads giving no result at all, it can still bring all the parties a lot of profit.

Are Gawend.xyz pop-up notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they may look harmless – just a blinking window that appears from time to time. However, the things this window promotes differ drastically from what you generally see in push notifications. Gawend.xyz site is ruled by fraudsters, who deliberately show hundreds and thousands of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any common sense and can make sporadic pop-up advertisements into a hurricane 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 any other thing that touches illegal advertising, Gawend.xyz pop-up advertisements don’t have legit deals to offer. Even though crooks make the banners similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, 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, Gawend.xyz push notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Gawend.xyz pop-ups?

Fortunately, Gawend.xyz pop-up advertisements removal is pretty easy. They parasite in the browser and can’t hide themselves among system files. Nonetheless, as I stated before, some pop-up advertisements can deliver malicious software to your computer. It is hard to predict all of the cases, and manual malware removal is a poor idea. For that reason, after disabling the pop-ups it is recommended 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. This situation may point at malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware scanning purposes, thanks to its abilities of system recovery and multi-layer detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in manual or automated way. The former, obviously, takes 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 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 Gawend.xyz 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 Gawend.xyz Pop-ups?

Name: Gawend.xyz

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