Hormatest pop-up advertisements appear when you do not expect, distracting and irritating you. Still, that is much more than simple pop-ups – their nature is purely malicious, and they may bring other malicious stuff to your device. In this article, I will show you the guide how to remove Hormatest pop-up notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.
Any time you interact with Hormatest pop-up notifications will be useless at best. At worst, the pages it can show you may introduce malware to your system. These push notifications can 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.
What are Hormatest pop-ups?
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 Hormatest notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal pop-ups are offered for you to enable on different sites with a legitimate purpose – keep you aware about the fresh posts, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful tool to help your website to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested visitors to have the best deal.
Short summary of the Hormatest.com pop-ups:
Name | Hormatest.com |
Hosting | AS16509 Amazon.com, Inc. India, Mumbai |
IP Address | 3.6.233.246 |
Malware type | Adware1 |
Effect | Unwanted pop-up advertisements |
Hazard level | Medium |
Malware source | Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites |
Similar behavior | Leqasforsalesrep, News, Humordog |
Removal method | To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC |
Hormatest pop-up advertisements, on the other hand, are related to untrustworthy websites. You will commonly witness the proposition to enable them following the redirection from another site. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless it throws you into such a dubious place. At that point, enabling pop-up ads is offered under the guise of the anti-DDoS filtering. In other cases, the web pages may deny showing you the contents unless you turn on these pop-ups. These theses should already raise suspicion, as websites commonly feature a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing such an demand is a reason to leave the website doubtlessly. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not see the web page – the sole page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up notifications.
How does it work?
The vast majority of web browsers support enabling pop-ups from websites. Websites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content of their choice. It can be an advertisement of the page listed on this website, or a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but interacting with it will direct you to site Y – because a referral link to that website was built in.
Scoundrels bear on this feature in their approach to gain money through advertising. They trick users into turning on pop-ups, and then just spread numerous promotions of anyone they contract with. As you can suppose, no image-caring organisations will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Hormatest popups you may see lead to other untrustworthy sites. At some point, the same victim may get into a trap of several pop-up spamming web pages, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.
The banners these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a negligible pay 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 much bigger sum. Despite most of these ads are ineffective, it may still bring all the parties a lot of money.
Are Hormatest pop-up ads dangerous?
Yes, they are. Initially, they may look non-threatening – just a colourful pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the things this window promotes differ drastically from what you generally see in pop-ups. Hormatest.com web page is ruled by fraudsters, who intentionally show tons of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic pop-up advertisements into a hurricane of ads. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But problems are not over at this point.
As with any other thing related to illegal ads, Hormatest pop-up advertisements do not contain any legit deals to offer. Even when crooks make the banners similar to ones from well-known retailers, the web page these ads will throw you to are completely different. And these pages may 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 ads 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, Hormatest push notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.
How to remove Hormatest pop-ups?
Fortunately, Hormatest push notifications removal is pretty easy. They sit in the web browser and can’t hide themselves in the system. Nonetheless, as I pointed out before, some pop-up notifications may promote malware to your computer. It is nearly impossible to predict all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is inconvenient. For that reason, 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 push notifications, and they still appeared. This situation can be a sign of malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both system recovery and malware scanning purposes, because of its abilities of system recovery and multi-layer detection system.
Initially, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to do in manual or automated way. The former, obviously, takes 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 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.
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:
- Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option:
- 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:
- Open Menu tab (three strips in upper right corner) and click the “Help” button. In the appeared menu choose “troubleshooting information”:
- In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:
After choosing this option, you will see the next message:
If you use Google Chrome
- Open Settings tab, find the “Advanced” button. In the extended tab choose the “Reset and clean up” button:
- In the appeared list, click on the “Restore settings to their original defaults”:
- 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
- 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:
- 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 Hormatest 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 Hormatest Pop-ups?
Name: Hormatest
Description: Hormatest - 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 Hormatest.com push notifications?” or “why do Hormatest.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Hormatest 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
User Review
( votes)References
- More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
- Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.