Remove Greatested Pop-up Ads — How to Fix Gude

Greatested pop-up notifications may appear unexpectedly, covering the material of the site you checked or opening your browser when you don’t desire it to be opened.

Clicking the Greatested advertisement may cause the injection of other malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the guide of Greatested popups clearing in multiple manners, as well as examining your personal computer for additional viruses existence.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Greatested 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 Greatested pop-ups?

Greatested popups are an effect of adware action. Adware is a sort of malware that shows you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click advertisements, which generates a massive amount of earnings for adware distributors. These ads might contain explicit content, or have a link to harmful content/website, considering that adware maintainers have no purpose to check the goodness of the content they are going to reveal – their single target is cash.

Greatested push notification.

Pop-up advertising itself is an excellent, low-cost and very effective advertising method¹. It allows the seller to attach the customers’ interest to their site, and the customers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they want to purchase. When the customer will receive a pop-up alert that the TV set he likes to buy is offered at the online store he/she checked out previously with a 15% discount, one will certainly use this opportunity and get it. Considering the very low price for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising and marketing tool is a favorite thing among the advertising teams of large internet sellers.

Nevertheless, such a rewarding system could not be missed by malware developers. Potential to demonstrate the popup advertisements by force to the people of malware attack is an excellent basis for malevolent tricks with the popup promotions. And Greatested.website advertisements is one of hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a short summary for the Greatested

How have I got the Greatested virus?

There are a number of methods of getting infected by the adware that create the Greatested popups storm. A lion’s part of this malware cases is after the free software or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Free software can additionally be downloaded from the official web page, and the adware is supplied as a legit bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A lot of people frequently make use of the dubious programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, different tools that are free, or perhaps hacked programs. All of these types of applications are unsafe, since it is very simple to integrate a Greatested malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Greatested popup malware can also be concealed in the ad somewhere on the odd website. Such sites are typically filled with bright and blinking ads, and their proprietors typically accept any promotions to be posted on their page. Hence, clicking such banners is a risky thing: only the ad contractor realizes what will happen when you press this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you may also receive something much more dangerous, like ransomware or coin miner; the large share of coin miners circulation is exactly after the malicious promotions.

The statistic shows that people dislike popup advertising more than other types of promotions

Potentially undesirable applications, like Greatested popup virus can initiate a lot of troubles on your personal computer. Distracting is not the only problem – pop-up notifications can present you the promotions, where you are offered to download another dubious program, or “a amazing anti-malware tool”. Scareware is often distributed under the last slogun. Potentially undesirable programs, in turn, may have spyware functions. And it is very hard to distinguish the undesirable app from a normal one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and dubious antiviruses, popup-related ads are also exploited as a distribution method by various trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such malware is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not clicking these advertisements, they may be clicked by someone who also makes use of your PC – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the things can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without data loss. It is recommended to eliminate the viruses with antivirus applications as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Greatested pop-up advertisements?

The guide of Greatested adware clearing consists of 2 sections. Initially, we need to get rid of the malware, and then take care of the effects of its activity. The elimination task is pretty easy, since it can be executed even with making use of Microsoft Defender – anti-malware software that is present on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, due to its substantial resources consumption, as well as some bugs that can be serious for some kinds of users, Defender is often disabled by the users, so its usage is probably impossible. Furthermore, a variety of trojan viruses have the ability to shut off the embedded antivirus. It is far better to make use of the separated program that will not have such exposures.

I’d suggest you to use Gridinsoft Anti-Malware² – a well-proven anti-malware device that will surely erase the malware from your system and also make an invulnerable cover with a Proactive protection function. But let’s handle Greatested adware first.

Removing Greatested popup virus with GridinSoft Anti-Malware

• Download and install GridinSoft Anti-Malware. After the installation, you will be offered to perform the Standard Scan. Approve this action.

• Standard scan checks the logical disk where the system files are stored, together with the files of programs you have already installed. The scan lasts up to 6 minutes.

• When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Greatested malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.

Now, when the computer is clean of viruses, we can proceed to the browser reset. You can do this step manually, as well as with the use of GridinSoft Anti-Malware.

Reset browser settings to default

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. 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 web browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your browser will definitely connect the appropriate DNS while connecting to the site you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your computer’s desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following text³:

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.

Nevertheless, there is one problem that makes things a lot more difficult to repair, particularly without the anti-malware program. Most of adware variants that are used to show you the Greatested pop-up advertisements are changing the deep browser setups, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to change your browser settings after your machine was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will collapse quickly. In some cases, you will see no crash, but large lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 seconds, and after that it will be back to the normal, until you try to open settings one more time.

Reset your browser settings 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 the options for each browser. By default, they are set up in the manner which 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 last is also able to reset the HOSTS file without any additional commands.

How to Remove Greatested Pop-ups?

Name: Greatested

Description: Greatested - 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 Greatested.website push notifications?” or “why do Greatested.website pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Greatested 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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1. More about pop-up ads on Wikipedia.
2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware overview and also the reasons why I advise it for malware removal.
3. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.