Remove Hairoak Pop-up Ads — How to Fix Gude

Hairoak pop-up notifications may show up unexpectedly, covering the content of the website you visited or opening your web browser when you don’t desire it to be opened.

Clicking on the Hairoak promotion may lead to the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this guide, you will see the guideline of Hairoak popups removal in several methods, and also checking your personal computer for other viruses existence.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Hairoak 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 Hairoak pop-ups?

Hairoak popups are a consequence of adware presence. Adware is a sort of malware that shows you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which produces a massive amount of earnings for adware distributors. These promotions might have explicit composition, or have a link to harmful content/website, due to the fact that adware maintainers have no purpose to examine the goodness of the material they are going to show – their single target is cash.

Hairoak push notification.

Pop-up promotions itself is a good, low-cost and also very efficient marketing solution¹. It allows the vendor to link the buyers’ attention to their site, as well as the buyers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they intend to buy. When the consumer will get a pop-up notification that the TV set he likes to purchase is available at the online shop he/she checked out earlier with a 15% discount, one will certainly use this opportunity and buy it. Taking into consideration the very small cost for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising and marketing instrument is a much-loved thing amongst the marketing departments of big online stores.

Nevertheless, such a profitable scheme could not be missed by malware developers. Ability to show the popup advertisements forcibly to the targets of malware invasion is an ideal basis for malevolent adjustments with the popup advertisements. And Hairoak.com promotions is among hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a summary for the Hairoak

How have I got the Hairoak virus?

There are a huge amount of methods of becoming contaminated by the adware that result in the Hairoak popups storm. A lion’s part of this virus incidents is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Freeware may additionally be downloaded from the main website, and the adware is offered as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A huge amount of people frequently work with the dubious programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, various tools that are free of cost, and even hacked programs. All of these types of programs are risky, since it is extremely simple to include a Hairoak malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Hairoak popup malware may likewise be concealed in the ad somewhere on the unusual site. Such websites are usually filled with intense and blinking advertisements, and their proprietors often approve any promotions to be placed on their page. Hence, clicking such banners is a risky thing: only the ad contractor realizes what will occur when you click this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you can also receive something much more threatening, 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 programs, like Hairoak pop-up virus may cause a lot of problems on your personal computer. Distracting is not the only problem – pop-up notifications may show you the promotions, where you are offered to get one more dubious program, or “a amazing security tool”. Scareware is often spread under the last slogun. Potentially unwanted programs, in turn, may have spyware functions. And it is pretty hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a good one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and dubious antiviruses, popup-related promotions are also chosen as a distribution method by various trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such malware is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And even if you are not clicking these banners, they may be clicked by someone who also uses your computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation may become much more serious, and it will be much harder to deal with it without information loss. It is recommended to get rid of the viruses with antivirus applications as soon as possible.

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

The guide of Hairoak adware elimination contains 2 parts. Initially, we need to get rid of the malware, and after that deal with the effects of its activity. The elimination task is pretty simple, since it may be done even with using Microsoft Defender – anti-virus software that is present on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, due to its large resources usage, as well as some problems that can be crucial for some categories of individuals, Defender is often turned off by the users, so its use is probably impossible. Moreover, a wide range of trojan viruses can switch off the embedded antivirus. It is far better to make use of the separated program that will not have such weakness.

I would certainly suggest you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware² – a well-proven antivirus device that will certainly exterminate the viruses from your personal computer and make an impenetrable cover with a Proactive protection feature. But let’s manage Hairoak adware first.

Removing Hairoak 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 Hairoak 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 browsers are reset, you need to make sure that your web browser will be connected the proper DNS while connecting to the web page you need. Make a text file titled “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then 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.

However, there is one issue that makes the things a lot harder to restore, especially without the anti-malware program. A lot of adware variants that are used to show you the Hairoak pop-up ads are modifying the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to fix your browser settings after your machine was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will crash soon. Sometimes, you will see no crash, but huge lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 secs, and afterwards it will be back to the normal, up until 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.

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.

1. More about pop-up ads on Wikipedia.
2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware review and the reasons why I advise it for malware elimination.
3. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.