HaveARealGoodTime Pop-up Ads Removal — How to Fix Your Browser?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
HaveARealGoodTime pop-ups appear out of the blue, disturbing and annoying you. Still, that is slightly more than just notifications – their nature is clearly malicious, and they can bring other malware to your device. In this article, I will show you the guide how to remove HaveARealGoodTime pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with HaveARealGoodTime pop-up advertisements will be ineffective at best. At worst, the sites it can throw you to may introduce malware to your system. These pop-up notifications may also promote fake online 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.

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What are HaveARealGoodTime 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 notifications and HaveARealGoodTime pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal push notifications are offered for you to enable with a straightforward purpose – keep you aware about the latest articles, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful thing to help your website to keep visitors and help the interested users to have the best deal.

Brief summary of the Havearealgoodtime.com pop-up ads:
NameHavearealgoodtime.com
HostingAS60781 LeaseWeb Netherlands B.V.
Netherlands, Amsterdam
IP Address37.48.80.112
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorRe, Celeb, Safewarns
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

HaveARealGoodTime pop-up ads, as opposed, have a deal with unlegit web pages. You will generally witness the offer to turn them on after a redirection from another page. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless they throw you to such a questionable place. In this case, turning on pop-up advertisements is offered under the guise of the anti-DDoS check. Alternatively, the web pages may deny showing you the contents unless you enable these pop-up advertisements. These demands should raise suspicion, as websites commonly have a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing such an demand is a reason to leave the website doubtlessly. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the web page – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up notifications.

HaveARealGoodTime push notification

HaveARealGoodTime push notification.

How does this work?

Most of web browsers support turning on pop-ups from websites. Sites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content they want. It can be a promotion of the product or a page listed for sale on this particular site, as well as an ad of their partner page. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but clicking it will throw you to website Y – because a referral link to the latter was embedded.

Cybercriminals rely on this feature in their attempt to earn money using illegal advertising. They trick victims into allowing them to show the banners, and after that just spread hundreds of ads of anyone they contract with. As you can suppose, no image-caring companies will contract with fraudsters. All the HaveARealGoodTime popups you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. In some cases, the same user can get into a trap of multiple pop-up spamming websites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It generally provides a negligible pay for one person, but when you can send ads to hundreds of victims and make it hundreds of times each day – that is a much bigger sum. Despite the majority of such banners are ineffective, it can still give all the parties a lot of money.

Are HaveARealGoodTime push notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look safe – just a colourful pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the things this window promotes differ sharply from what you generally see in pop-up notifications. Havearealgoodtime.com web page is controlled by fraudsters, who intendedly throw hundreds of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic pop-up advertisements into a storm of ads. For weak computers, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all problems these pop-ups carry.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing that touches illegal advertising, HaveARealGoodTime pop-ups do not contain any legit offers. Even when hackers make the banners similar to ones from well-known retailers, the site 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 push notifications 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, HaveARealGoodTime pop-ups are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove HaveARealGoodTime pop-ups?

Fortunately, HaveARealGoodTime pop-ups removal is not very complicated. They sit in the web browser and cannot hide themselves in the system. However, as I pointed out before, some pop-up advertisements may promote malware to your computer. It is nearly impossible to describe all cases, and manual malware removal is a bad idea. Thus, after removing the source of the pop-up advertisements the best option is to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended if you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up advertisements, but they still appeared. That may be a sign of malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware removal purposes, because of its abilities of system recovery and superb detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in both manual and automatic manner. 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 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.

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 site 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 HaveARealGoodTime 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 HaveARealGoodTime Pop-ups?

Name: HaveARealGoodTime

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