Gossipfeast Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Gossipfeast pop-up advertisements appear when you do not expect, disturbing and irritating you. Nonetheless, they are much more than just notifications – their nature is cleanly malicious, and they may bring other malicious stuff to your system. In this post, I will show you how to remove Gossipfeast push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Gossipfeast pop-up advertisements will be ineffective at best. In worst case scenario, the websites it can open can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up notifications can also promote fake 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 Gossipfeast push 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 Gossipfeast pop-ups is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal pop-up ads are offered for you to enable with a understandable purpose – keep you aware about the latest publications, discounts and so on. It is a useful thing to help your website to retain visitors and help the interested users to have the best price.

Brief summary of the Gossipfeast.com pop-up ads:
NameGossipfeast.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address172.67.187.230
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorNewsfeedmail, News, Selfarouck
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Gossipfeast pop-up ads, as opposed, are related to less legit sites. You will generally witness the offer to enable them after a redirection from another website. It’s OK to see redirects unless it throws you to such a dubious place. In this case, turning on pop-ups is offered under the guise of the anti-DDoS check. Alternatively, the web pages can deny showing you the content unless you turn on these pop-up ads. These requirements should be the red flag, as websites commonly have a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing such an offer should be the reason to leave the website doubtlessly. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not get to the site – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up advertisements.

Gossipfeast push notification

Gossipfeast push notification.

How does this work?

Most of web browsers support enabling push notifications from sites. Websites, on the other hand, may send notifications with the content of their choice. It can be a promotion of the product or a page posted on this particular site, or an ad of the page of their partner. 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 that website was built in.

Cybercriminals bear on this feature in their attempt to earn money using illegal advertising. They trick users into allowing them to show the banners, and then just spread numerous promotions of anyone they have a deal with. As you can suppose, no benevolent companies will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Gossipfeast push ads you can see lead to other untrustworthy 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 promotions these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a negligible commission for one person, but when you have hundreds of users and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a way bigger sum. Even though most of such ads giving no result at all, it can still bring all the parties a lot of money.

Are Gossipfeast push notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look harmless – just a colourful pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you used to see in push notifications. Gossipfeast.com website is ruled by fraudsters, who intentionally throw tons of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can make sporadic pop-up notifications into a storm of promotions. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all problems these pop-up advertisements carry.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing that touches illegal ads, Gossipfeast pop-up notifications do not contain any legit offers. Even when hackers make the ads 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-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, Gossipfeast pop-up ads are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Gossipfeast pop-ups?

Fortunately, Gossipfeast push notifications removal is pretty easy. They reside in the browser and can’t conceal themselves among system files. However, as I told before, some pop-up notifications may deliver malware to your computer. It is hard to describe all of the cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a bad idea. Thus, after removing the source of the pop-up notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended if you have never allowed pop-ups, but they still appeared. This situation can point at malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware checkup 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 accomplish in both manual and automatic manner. 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 Gossipfeast 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 Gossipfeast Pop-ups?

Name: Gossipfeast

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