Hcafpg Ads Removal Guide — Fix Push Notification

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Hcafpg pop-up notifications appear out of the blue, disturbing and irritating you. However, that is way more than simple pop-ups – their origins is clearly malignant, and they can install other malware to your device. In this article, I will guide you on how to remove Hcafpg pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Hcafpg pop-up notifications will be useless at best. At worst, the pages it can open may introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements can also promote 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.

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What are Hcafpg 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 Hcafpg notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal pop-ups are offered for you to enable on different sites with a straightforward purpose – notify you about the fresh articles, discounts and so on. It is a useful thing to help your website to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested users to have the best price.

Brief description of the Hcafpg.com pop-ups:
NameHcafpg.com
HostingAS39572 DataWeb Global Group B.V.
Netherlands, Amsterdam
IP Address185.56.234.205
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorHarmonypix, Kagis, Tezirg
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Hcafpg pop-up ads, on the other hand, have a deal with less legit websites. You will generally witness the proposition to enable them after a redirection from another site. Redirects are OK unless it throws you to such a questionable place. In this case, turning on push notifications is offered under the guise of the anti-bot check-up. Alternatively, the web pages can deny showing you the contents unless you turn on these pop-up advertisements. These requirements should raise suspicion, as sites commonly have a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing this offer is a reason to leave the website right away. Sometimes, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not get to the site – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up advertisements.

Hcafpg push notification

Hcafpg push notification.

How does this work?

The majority of web browsers support enabling push notifications from sites. Websites, on the other hand, can send out notifications with the content of their choice. It can be an advertisement of the product or a page listed on this site, as well as a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but clicking it will throw you to website Y – because a link to the latter was added.

Scoundrels rely on this feature in their attempt to earn money through advertising. They trick users into allowing the pop-ups, and after that just spread hundreds of promotions of anyone they contract with. As you may suppose, no image-caring companies will have a business with fraudsters. All the Hcafpg push ads you may see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same user can be trapped by several pop-up spamming websites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

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

Are Hcafpg push notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they may look non-threatening – just a blinking pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you generally see in pop-up ads. Hcafpg.com web page is controlled by crooks, who deliberately spread hundreds of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can make sporadic push notifications into a storm of promotions. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But troubles are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing that touches illegal advertising, Hcafpg push notifications do not contain any legit offers. Even though crooks make the ads looking similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the web page 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-up 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, Hcafpg 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 Hcafpg pop-ups?

Fortunately, Hcafpg pop-up notifications removal is not very complicated. They parasite in the web browser and can’t hide themselves in the system. Nevertheless, as I told before, some pop-ups may deliver malicious software to your computer. It is hard to show all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a bad idea. For that reason, after getting rid of the pop-up advertisements it is recommended to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that in the case when you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up ads, and they still appeared. That can be a sign of malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware scanning purposes, thanks to its system recovery functionality and multi-layer detection system.

First and foremost, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to accomplish 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 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 Hcafpg 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 Hcafpg Pop-ups?

Name: Hcafpg

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