Remove Gicurs.xyz Pop-up Ads — How to Fix Gude

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Gicurs.xyz pop-up notifications appear out of the blue, distracting and annoying you. However, that is way more than simple pop-ups – their nature is cleanly malicious, and they may introduce other malicious stuff to your device. In this post, I will show you the guide how to remove Gicurs.xyz push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Gicurs.xyz pop-ups will be ineffective at best. At worst, the pages it can show you can introduce malware to your system. These push notifications can also promote 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 Gicurs.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 Gicurs.xyz notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal pop-up ads are offered for you to enable with a legitimate purpose – notify you about the new articles, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful thing to help your site to keep visitors and help the interested ones to have the best deal.

Brief summary of the Gicurs.xyz pop-up ads:
NameGicurs.xyz
HostingAS14061 DigitalOcean, LLC
United States, North Bergen
IP Address157.230.4.182
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorMybvids, Reqdfit, News
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Gicurs.xyz push notifications, in contrast, are related to untrustworthy web pages. You will commonly see the offer to turn them on following the redirection from another site. Redirects are OK unless they throw you into such a dubious place. At that point, enabling push notifications is served under the guise of the anti-bot check-up. Alternatively, the sites can refuse to show you the contents unless you turn on these push notifications. These theses should raise suspicion, as sites generally feature a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Seeing this requirement should be the reason to close the site doubtlessly. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not get to the web page – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the push notifications.

Gicurs.xyz push notification

Gicurs.xyz push notification.

How does this work?

Most of browsers support enabling pop-ups from websites. Sites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content they like. It may be a promotion of the product or a page posted on this website, or an ad of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but opening it will direct you to site Y – because a referral link to that website was embedded.

Cybercriminals rely on this feature in their attempt to gain money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing the pop-ups, and then just spread numerous promotions of anyone they contract with. As you may suppose, no benevolent companies will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Gicurs.xyz popups you may see lead to other untrustworthy sites. At some point, the same user may be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming websites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It generally provides a miserable payment for one viewer, but when you have a huge number of victims and make it hundreds of times every day – that is a way bigger sum. Even though most of these ads are ineffective, it may still bring all the parties a lot of profit.

Are Gicurs.xyz pop-ups dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they may look safe – just a colourful window that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-up advertisements. Gicurs.xyz website is ruled by fraudsters, who deliberately spread tons of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can make sporadic pop-up notifications into a hurricane of banners. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But problems are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing that touches illegal ads, Gicurs.xyz push notifications lack legit offers. Even when crooks make the banners looking similar to ones from well-known retailers, the website 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-ups 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, Gicurs.xyz pop-ups are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Gicurs.xyz pop-ups?

Fortunately, Gicurs.xyz pop-up ads removal is not very complicated. They parasite in the web browser and cannot hide themselves on a disk. However, as I stated above, some push notifications may promote malware to your system. It is hard to show all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a bad idea. For that reason, after getting rid of the pop-up advertisements the best option is to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that in the case when you have never allowed pop-up notifications, but they still appeared. That can be a sign of malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware checkup purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and multi-component detection system.

First and foremost, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in manual or automated way. 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 Gicurs.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 Gicurs.xyz Pop-ups?

Name: Gicurs.xyz

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