Heartmedia Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Heartmedia pop-up alerts may show up out of the blue, covering the post of the site you visited or opening your browser when you don’t want it to be opened.

Clicking the Heartmedia ad may lead to the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the guide of Heartmedia popups clearing in multiple ways, and also examining your computer for extra viruses presence.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Heartmedia 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.

DOWNLOAD NOW

Gridinsoft Anti-Malware 6-day trial available.
EULA | Privacy Policy | 10% Off Coupon

Subscribe to our Telegram channel to be the first to know about news and our exclusive materials on information security.

What are Heartmedia pop-ups?

Heartmedia popups are a result of adware presence. Adware is a kind of malware that demonstrates to you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click promotions, which produces a substantial volume of earnings for adware representatives. These ads might have explicit material, or have a link to harmful content/website, due to the fact that adware maintainers have no reason to examine the goodness of the content they are going to show – their solitary target is cash.

Heartmedia push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is an excellent, affordable and very efficient advertising solution¹. It permits the seller to link the customers’ attention to their site, as well as the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they wish to purchase. When the consumer will get a pop-up alert that the TV set he desires to purchase is offered at the online store he/she visited earlier with a 15% discount, one will definitely use this opportunity and purchase it. Considering the very low cost for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising and marketing method is a much-loved thing amidst the advertising teams of huge internet retailers.

However, such a rewarding plan could not be missed by virus developers. Potential to demonstrate the popup advertisements forcibly to the people of malware attack is an ideal basis for malicious tricks with the popup advertisements. And Heartmedia.biz ads is just one of hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a short summary for the Heartmedia site

How have I got the Heartmedia virus?

There are a lot of methods of becoming contaminated by the adware that cause the Heartmedia popups storm. A lion’s part of this computer virus instances is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Free software may additionally be downloaded from the official web page, and the adware is offered as a legit bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A plenty of users often make use of the uncertain programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, various tools that are free of cost, or even hacked programs. All of these sorts of programs are dangerous, due to the fact that it is very simple to build in a Heartmedia malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

Heartmedia popup virus may additionally be concealed in the ad somewhere on the unusual site. Such web pages are generally full of bright and blinking advertisements, and their owners typically approve any kind of promotions to be placed on their web page. Thus, clicking on such banners is a risky thing: only the ad contractor realizes what will occur when you click this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or unwanted programs, you may additionally get something far more dangerous, like ransomware or coin miner; the substantial share of coin miners distribution is exactly after the malicious ads.

The statistic shows that people dislike popup advertising more than other types of promotions

Potentially unwanted programs, like Heartmedia popup virus may cause a lot of troubles on your PC. Distracting is not the only problem – pop-ups may display you the ads, where you are offered to get one more dubious program, or “a effective security tool”. Scareware is often spread with the last slogun. Potentially unwanted applications, in turn, may have spyware functionality. And it is very hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a legit one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and fake antiviruses, popup-related promotions are also chosen as a distribution method by different trojan viruses, for example – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such viruses is 100% unwanted, and can cost you hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not clicking these ads, they may be clicked by whoever who also uses your computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation may become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without data loss. It is recommended to get rid of the viruses with anti-malware applications as soon as possible.

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

The manual of Heartmedia adware clearing includes 2 parts. First, we need to eliminate the malware, and afterwards deal with the effects of its action. The elimination procedure is really easy, due to the fact that it may be done even with making use of Microsoft Defender – anti-virus program that is available on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. Nonetheless, as a result of its large resources consumption, along with some errors that may be serious for some categories of users, Defender is oftentimes turned off by the users, so its usage is likely impossible. Additionally, various trojan viruses can turn off the embedded antivirus. It is better to make use of the separated program that will not have such vulnerabilities.

I’d suggest you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware² – a well-proven antivirus device that will surely remove the viruses from your system and create an impenetrable cover with a Proactive protection function. But let’s take care of Heartmedia adware initially.

Removing Heartmedia 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 Heartmedia 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 web browsers are reset, you need to make sure that your browser will be connected the appropriate DNS while connecting to the web page you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following content³:

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 trouble that makes things a lot harder to restore, especially without the anti-malware software. Most of adware versions that are utilized to show you the Heartmedia pop-up advertisements are adjusting the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to fix your browser settings after your system was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will collapse soon. Sometimes, you will see no crash, however, large lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 secs, and afterwards it will be back to the normal, until you attempt to open settings once more.

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 advertisements on Wikipedia.
2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware review and also the reasons why I recommend it for malware removal.
3. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.