Remove Harmonyboss Virus — How to Fix Guide

Harmonyboss pop-up advertisements appear when you do not expect, distracting and annoying you. Nonetheless, that is slightly more than simple pop-up ads – their essence is purely malignant, and they can introduce other malicious stuff to your PC. In this post, I will show you the guide how to remove Harmonyboss push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Harmonyboss push notifications will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the web pages it can open may introduce malware to your system. These push notifications may also advertise fake shopping sites 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 Harmonyboss 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 Harmonyboss 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 Harmonyboss notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal pop-up advertisements are offered for you to enable on different sites with a understandable purpose – keep you aware about the new articles, goods for sale 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 Harmonyboss.com pop-up ads:

Harmonyboss pop-ups, as opposed, have a deal with untrustworthy sites. You will commonly observe the offer to enable them following the redirection from another site. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless it throws you into such a dubious place. In this case, enabling pop-up advertisements is served under the guise of the anti-bot check-up. Alternatively, the web pages may deny showing you the content unless you turn on these pop-up notifications. These requirements should be the red flag, as sites usually feature a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing this requirement should be the reason to leave the website right away. Sometimes, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not get to the site – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the push notifications.

Harmonyboss push notification.

How does it work?

Most of browsers support enabling push notifications from sites. Websites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content they like. It may be an advertisement of the page published on this particular website, as well as a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but opening it will redirect you to website Y – because a referral link to the latter was added.

Cyber burglars rely on this feature in their attempt to earn money using illegal advertising. They trick users into allowing the pop-ups, and then just spread numerous ads of other crooks they contract with. As you can suppose, no legit companies will have a business with fraudsters. All the Harmonyboss popups you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. In some cases, the same user may be trapped by several pop-up spamming websites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The promotions these rascals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It generally provides a negligible commission for one person, but when you have a huge number of victims and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a much more significant sum. Even though the majority of these banners are ineffective, it can still give all the participants a lot of money.

Are Harmonyboss pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they may look harmless – just a blinking window that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you generally see in pop-ups. Harmonyboss.com website is controlled by crooks, who intendedly show hundreds of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any common sense and can make sporadic pop-up advertisements into a hurricane of ads. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But troubles are not over at this point.

As with any other thing related to illegal advertising, Harmonyboss pop-up ads lack legit offers. Even though hackers make the banners similar to ones from well-known retailers, the site these ads 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, Harmonyboss pop-up advertisements are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Harmonyboss pop-ups?

Fortunately, Harmonyboss pop-up notifications removal is not very complicated. They sit in the browser and cannot conceal themselves on a disk. Nonetheless, as I stated above, some pop-ups can introduce malicious programs to your system. It is nearly impossible to show all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is inconvenient. Therefore, after disabling the push notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended in the case when you have never allowed push notifications, but they still appeared. This situation may be a sign of malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware checkup 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 can 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 “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 Harmonyboss 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).

How to Remove Harmonyboss Pop-ups?

Name: Harmonyboss

Description: Harmonyboss - 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 Harmonyboss.com push notifications?” or “why do Harmonyboss.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Harmonyboss 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 this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
2. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.