Remove Hanigs.xyz Pop-up Ads — How to Fix Gude

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Hanigs.xyz push notifications appear when you do not expect, detracting and annoying you. However, that is slightly more than simple pop-up ads – their essence is surely malicious, and they can install other malicious stuff to your device. In this article, I will show you how to remove Hanigs.xyz push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Hanigs.xyz pop-up advertisements will be useless at best. At worst, the sites it can show you can introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups can also promote 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.

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What are Hanigs.xyz 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 Hanigs.xyz pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Common pop-up advertisements are offered for you to enable on different sites with a benevolent purpose – keep you aware about the fresh publications, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful tool to help your website to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested users to have the best price.

Brief summary of the Hanigs.xyz pop-ups:
NameHanigs.xyz
HostingAS14061 DigitalOcean, LLC
United States, North Bergen
IP Address157.230.4.182
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorRomanticdatingseason, Cabert, News
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Hanigs.xyz pop-ups, as opposed, have a deal with unlegit sites. You will generally witness the proposition to turn them on following the redirection from another page. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless they throw you to such a questionable place. At that point, enabling pop-up ads is offered under the guise of the anti-bot check-up. In other cases, the websites may deny showing you the contents unless you turn on these pop-up notifications. These theses should raise suspicion, as sites usually feature a different anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing such an offer is a reason to close the page doubtlessly. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not get to the website – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the push notifications.

Hanigs.xyz push notification

Hanigs.xyz push notification.

How does this work?

The majority of web browsers support turning on push notifications from websites. Websites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content they want. It can be a promotion of the product listed on this particular site, as well as a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you can see the pop-up from site X, but clicking it will redirect you to website Y – because a referral link to that website was built in.

Crooks rely on this feature in their approach to earn money through advertising. They trick users into allowing the pop-ups, and then just spread hundreds of ads of other crooks they have a deal with. As you can suppose, no benevolent organisations will have a business with fraudsters. All the Hanigs.xyz popups you may see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same user may be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming websites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The ads these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a negligible pay for one viewer, but when you have a huge number of users and make it hundreds of times each day – that is a way bigger sum. Even though the majority of such banners giving no result at all, it can still bring all the participants a lot of money.

Are Hanigs.xyz pop-up notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they can 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 push notifications. Hanigs.xyz website is ruled by crooks, who deliberately spread tons of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can launch sporadic push notifications into a hurricane of promotions. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all troubles these pop-ups carry.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing related to illegal ads, Hanigs.xyz push notifications do not contain any legit offers. Even when hackers make the banners looking similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the web page these banners will throw you to are completely different. And these pages can 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-ups 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, Hanigs.xyz pop-ups are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Hanigs.xyz pop-ups?

Fortunately, Hanigs.xyz pop-up advertisements removal is pretty easy. They parasite in the web browser and can’t conceal themselves among system files. However, as I told before, some push notifications can promote malicious programs to your computer. It is hard to show all of the cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a poor idea. Thus, after getting rid of the push notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. That is especially recommended if you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up advertisements, but they still appeared. That can point at malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware scanning and removal purposes, thanks to its abilities of system recovery and multi-component detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in manual or automated way. The former, obviously, requires 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 may 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 web page 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 Hanigs.xyz 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 Hanigs.xyz Pop-ups?

Name: Hanigs.xyz

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