Gokend.xyz pop-up advertisements appear when you do not expect, disturbing and irritating you. However, they are slightly more than annoying notifications – their nature is surely malignant, and they may install other malware to your PC. In this article, I will guide you on how to remove Gokend.xyz push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.
Any interaction with Gokend.xyz push notifications will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the sites it can open may introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements can also promote 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.
What are Gokend.xyz pop-up notifications?
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 ads and Gokend.xyz notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal pop-up ads are offered for you to enable with a benevolent purpose – notify you about the latest articles, discounts and so on. It is an effective approach to help your site to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested visitors to have the best deal.
Brief summary of the Gokend.xyz pop-ups:
Name | Gokend.xyz |
Hosting | AS14061 DigitalOcean, LLC United States, North Bergen |
IP Address | 157.230.4.182 |
Malware type | Adware1 |
Effect | Unwanted pop-up advertisements |
Hazard level | Medium |
Malware source | Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites |
Similar behavior | Sysbooster, Atm, Nomadsfit |
Removal method | To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC |
Gokend.xyz pop-up ads, in contrast, are related to untrustworthy websites. You will commonly see the offer to enable them after a redirection from another website. It’s OK to see redirects unless they throw you to such a questionable place. In this case, turning on pop-up advertisements is served under the guise of the anti-bot check-up. In other cases, the websites can refuse to show you the contents unless you enable these push notifications. These demands should already be the red flag, as sites usually feature a different anti-bot mechanism. Spectating such an requirement should be the reason to close the site doubtlessly. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not get to the site – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-ups.
How does this work?
The vast majority of browsers support turning on pop-ups from websites. Sites, on the other hand, may send notifications with the content they like. It may be an advertisement of the product or a page posted on this site, as well as an ad of the page of their partner. As a result, you can see the push notification from site X, but opening it will throw you to site Y – because a referral link to that website was built in.
Crooks rely on this feature 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 banners of anyone they have a deal with. As you can suppose, no legit companies will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Gokend.xyz notifications you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same victim may be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming sites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.
The ads these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It generally provides a negligible pay for one person, but when you have a huge number of users and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a much more significant sum. Despite most of these ads are ineffective, it may still bring all the parties a lot of profit.
Are Gokend.xyz pop-up notifications dangerous?
Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look harmless – just a colourful window that appears from time to time. However, the things this window promotes differ sharply from what you generally see in push notifications. Gokend.xyz web page is controlled by fraudsters, who deliberately throw hundreds and thousands of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any common sense and can make sporadic pop-ups into a storm of promotions. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all troubles these push notifications carry.
As with any other thing related to illegal ads, Gokend.xyz pop-ups don’t have legit deals to offer. Even when hackers make the ads similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the web page these banners 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 ads 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, Gokend.xyz 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 Gokend.xyz pop-ups?
Fortunately, Gokend.xyz pop-up ads removal is not very complicated. They sit in the browser and can’t conceal themselves among system files. Nevertheless, as I told above, some pop-up notifications can introduce malicious programs to your computer. It is nearly impossible to predict all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a bad idea. For that reason, after removing the source of the pop-up notifications it is recommended to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended in the case when you have never clicked “Allow” to push notifications, but they still appeared. That can be a sign of adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware scanning and removal purposes, thanks to its abilities of system recovery and superb detection system.
First of all, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to do 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.
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.
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:
- Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option:
- 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:
- Open Menu tab (three strips in upper right corner) and click the “Help” button. In the appeared menu choose “troubleshooting information”:
- In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:
After choosing this option, you will see the next message:
If you use Google Chrome
- Open Settings tab, find the “Advanced” button. In the extended tab choose the “Reset and clean up” button:
- In the appeared list, click on the “Restore settings to their original defaults”:
- 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
- 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:
- 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 Gokend.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.
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).
How to Remove Gokend.xyz Pop-ups?
Name: Gokend.xyz
Description: Gokend.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 Gokend.xyz push notifications?” or “why do Gokend.xyz pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Gokend.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
User Review
( votes)References
- More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
- Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.