Remove Great Captchas Now Top Virus — How to Fix Guide

Great Captchas Now Top (Greatcaptchasnow.top) ads appear out of the blue, detracting and annoying you. Still, they are much more than simple pop-ups – their nature is purely malignant, and they can bring other malware to your PC. In this post, I will show you how to remove Greatcaptchasnow.top pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Great Captchas Now Top pop-ups will be ineffective at best. At worst, the websites can show you can introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups can 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.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Great Captchas Now Top manually may take hours and may damage your PC in the process. I recommend you to download GridinSoft Anti-Malware for threats removal. Allows to complete scan and cure your PC during the trial period.

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What are Great Captchas Now Top 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 advertisements and Greatcaptchasnow.top pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal pop-ups are offered for you to enable with a straightforward purpose – keep you aware of fresh publications, discounts, and so on. It is a useful tool to help your site to retain visitors and help the interested ones to have the best price.

Short summary of the Greatcaptchasnow.top pop-up ads:

Greatcaptchasnow.top pop-up notifications, as opposed, have a deal with untrustworthy sites. You will commonly see the offer to enable them following the redirection from another site. It’s OK to see redirects unless they throw you into such a questionable place. At that point, turning on pop-ups is offered as the anti-DDoS check. In other cases, the web pages may deny showing you the content unless you enable these push notifications. These theses should raise suspicion, as websites generally feature a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Seeing this offer is a 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-ups.

Great Captchas Now Top push notification.

How does it work?

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

Cyber burglars rely on this feature in their attempt to gain money using illegal advertising. They trick users into turning on pop-ups, and then just spread numerous promotions of anyone they contract with. As you can suppose, no legit organizations will have business with fraudsters. All the Great Captchas Now Top push ads you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same victim can get into a trap of multiple pop-up spamming web pages, and its web 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 pay for one view, but when you can send ads to a huge number of victims and make it hundreds of times every day – that is a much more significant sum. Despite most of these banners are ineffective, it may still give all the parties a lot of profit.

Are Great Captchas Now Top push notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they may look non-threatening – just a colourful pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-up ads. Greatcaptchasnow.top website is ruled by crooks, who deliberately spread hundreds of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic pop-up ads into a hurricane of promotions. For weak computers, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all problems these push notifications carry.

As any other thing related to illegal advertising, Greatcaptchasnow.top push notifications don’t have legit offers. Even though crooks make the ads similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, 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 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, Greatcaptchasnow.top 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 Greatcaptchasnow.top pop-ups?

Fortunately, Great Captchas Now Top pop-up notifications removal is pretty easy. They parasite in the web browser and cannot conceal themselves in the system. However, as I told you before, some pop-up advertisements can introduce malware to your computer. It is nearly impossible to show all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a poor idea. Thus, after getting rid of the pop-up notifications it is recommended to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that in the case when you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up ads, they still appeared. That can point at malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware scanning and removal purposes, because of its abilities of system recovery and multi-component detection system.

First and foremost, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to do it in a 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.

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.

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 the “Reset settings” option:

2. 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. In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:

After choosing this option, you will see the next message:

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 website you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following lines²:

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 Greatcaptchasnow.top 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).

1. More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
2. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.