Remove Guardedaffiliate.store Pop-up Ads — How to Fix Gude

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Guardedaffiliate.store pop-up notices can appear unexpectedly, covering the material of the website you went to or opening your browser when you do not need it to be opened.

Clicking on the Guardedaffiliate.store promotion may cause the injection of other malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the guideline of Guardedaffiliate.store popups removal in various methods, and also inspecting your personal computer for additional malware presence.

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What are Guardedaffiliate.store pop-ups?

Guardedaffiliate.store popups are an outcome of adware activity. Adware is a sort of malware that presents you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which generates a significant amount of revenue for adware representatives. These promotions may consist of explicit composition, or have a web link to malevolent content/website, since adware maintainers have no purpose to check the goodness of the material they are going to show – their solitary target is cash.

Guardedaffiliate.store push notification

Guardedaffiliate.store push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is a very good, low-cost and extremely effective advertising instrument1. It enables the seller to attach the buyers’ attention to their website, as well as the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they want to buy. When the person will receive a pop-up alert that the TV set he likes to purchase is available at the online store he/she saw earlier with a 15% price cut, one will surely use this opportunity and get it. Taking into consideration the exceptionally low price for the popups and their targeting, such a promotion and marketing instrument is a much-loved thing amidst the advertising teams of huge online retail stores.

Nevertheless, such a successful strategy could not be missed by malware creators. Ability to show the popup advertisements by force to the people of malware attack is an excellent basis for evil-minded tricks with the popup promotions. And Guardedaffiliate.store ads is among hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a details for the Guardedaffiliate.store
Site Guardedaffiliate.store
Hosting AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 104.21.12.144
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior News, Gadiv, Mscreviews
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Guardedaffiliate.store virus?

There are a plenty of ways of getting infected by the adware that cause the Guardedaffiliate.store popups storm. A lion’s part of this virus cases is after the free software or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Free software may likewise be downloaded from the main site, and the adware is offered as a legit bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A plenty of people regularly work with the uncertain programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, various tools that are free, and even hacked programs. All of these types of programs are unsafe, because it is quite simple to integrate a Guardedaffiliate.store malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

Guardedaffiliate.store popup malware can also be hidden in the promotion somewhere on the unusual website. Such websites are typically packed with bright and blinking advertisements, and their owners usually approve any promos to be published on their page. Hence, clicking such banners is a risky thing: only the ad provider knows what will happen when you click this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or unwanted programs, you may likewise get something far more dangerous, like ransomware or coin miner; the big share of coin miners circulation is exactly after the malicious ads.

People dislike popups

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

Potentially unwanted programs, like Guardedaffiliate.store pop-up virus may cause a variety of different problems on your computer. Distracting is not the only effect – pop-ups may present you the promotions, where you are offered to download another strange program, or “a amazing security tool”. Scareware is often distributed under the last motto. Potentially undesirable programs, in turn, may have spyware functionality. 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 pseudo antiviruses, popup-related banners are also chosen as a distribution way by different trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such malware is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you several hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not tapping these promotions, they may be clicked by someone who also makes use of your personal computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without data and money loss. It is recommended to wipe out the viruses with antivirus programs as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Guardedaffiliate.store pop-up advertisements?

The manual of Guardedaffiliate.store adware clearing includes 2 sections. First, we need to get rid of the malware, and after that take care of the effects of its action. The elimination process is pretty easy, because it can be done even with using Microsoft Defender – anti-malware software that is present on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, due to its significant resources consumption, as well as some failures that may be serious for some types of individuals, Defender is often disabled by the users, so its usage is most likely impossible. In addition, various trojan viruses have the ability to switch off the embedded antivirus. It is much better to use the separated program that will not have such vulnerabilities.

I would certainly advise you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven security tool that will definitely remove the malware from your computer and also create an invulnerable shield with a Proactive protection feature. But let’s manage Guardedaffiliate.store adware initially.

Removing Guardedaffiliate.store 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.
  • Gridinsoft Anti-Malware during the scan process

  • 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.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware scan results

  • When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Guardedaffiliate.store malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware - After Cleaning

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. 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 web browsers are reset, you need to make sure that your web browser will definitely connect the correct DNS while connecting to the site you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following content3:

# 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.

However, there is one problem that makes things a lot harder to fix, especially without the anti-malware software. Most of adware versions that are utilized to show you the Guardedaffiliate.store pop-up advertisements are modifying the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to change your browser settings after your PC was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will crash quickly. In certain cases, you will see no crash, however, huge lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 seconds, and then it will be back to the typical, till you try to open settings once again.

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.

Tools tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

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.

Reset Browser Settings tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

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 Guardedaffiliate.store Pop-ups?

Name: Guardedaffiliate.store

Description: Guardedaffiliate.store - 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 Guardedaffiliate.store push notifications?” or “why do Guardedaffiliate.store pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Guardedaffiliate.store 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 pop-up ads on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware overview and also the reasons why I suggest it for malware elimination.
  3. 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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