Remove Hotrend Virus — How to Fix Guide

Hotrend pop-up alerts may appear out of the blue, covering the post of the site you visited or opening your browser when you do not wish it to be opened.

Clicking the Hotrend ad may result in the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this post, you will see the tutorial of Hotrend popups clearing in multiple ways, and also inspecting your PC for other viruses existence.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Hotrend 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 Hotrend pop-ups?

Hotrend popups are an effect of adware action. Adware is a kind of malware that suggests you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click advertisements, which creates a massive volume of profit for adware representatives. These promotions may include sometimes shocking material, or have a link to harmful content/website, considering that adware maintainers have no reason to inspect the goodness of the material they are going to show – their single target is cash.

Hotrend push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is a good, low-priced and also very effective marketing solution¹. It makes it possible for the vendor to attach the customers’ interest to their site, as well as the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they want to purchase. When the consumer will get a pop-up notification that the TV set he likes to purchase is offered at the online shop he/she checked out earlier with a 15% price cut, one will certainly use this possibility and buy it. Taking into consideration the exceptionally low price for the popups and their targeting, such a marketing tool is a much-loved thing among the marketing departments of huge internet stores.

Nevertheless, such a successful scheme could not be missed by malware creators. Potential to demonstrate the popup advertisements forcibly to the people of malware invasion is an excellent basis for malevolent manipulations with the popup advertisements. And Hotrend.biz ads is among hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a info for the Hotrend site

How have I got the Hotrend virus?

There are a lot of methods of getting contaminated by the adware that result in the Hotrend popups storm. A lion’s part of this malware instances is after the free software or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Free software may also be downloaded from the official site, and the adware is supplied as a legitimate bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A lot of people oftentimes use the uncertain programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, a wide range of utilities that are free, or even hacked programs. Every one of these types of programs are dangerous, because it is extremely simple to include a Hotrend malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Hotrend popup malware can likewise be concealed in the ad somewhere on the odd web page. Such sites are generally filled with colorful and blinking advertisements, and their proprietors usually approve any kind of promotions to be placed on their page. For this reason, clicking such banners is a risky thing: only the ad provider realizes what will happen when you press this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or unwanted programs, you may additionally get something much more risky, like ransomware or coin miner; the big share of coin miners distribution is exactly after the malicious advertisements.

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

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

The manual of Hotrend adware elimination includes 2 parts. Initially, we need to exterminate the malware, and then deal with the results of its activity. The elimination process is quite simple, due to the fact that it may be executed even with using Microsoft Defender – anti-virus software that is available on all computers with Windows 8/10. However, due to its large resources consumption, along with some failures that can be crucial for some kinds of users, Defender is often turned off by the users, so its usage is probably impossible. Furthermore, a wide range of trojan viruses can disable the embedded antivirus. It is far better to make use of the separated program that will not have such weakness.

I’d recommend you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware² – a well-proven security tool that will surely wipe out the malware from your personal computer and also make an impenetrable cover with a Proactive protection feature. However, let’s take care of Hotrend adware first.

Removing Hotrend 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 Hotrend 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 browsers are reset, you need to make sure that your web browser will definitely connect the right DNS while connecting to the web page you want. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following text³:

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 issue that makes things a lot harder to repair, particularly without the anti-malware software. Most of adware variations that are utilized to show you the Hotrend pop-up promotions are changing the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to fix your browser settings after your computer was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will collapse soon. In some cases, you will see no crash, however, huge lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 secs, and after that it will be back to the typical, till 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 ads on Wikipedia.
2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware overview and also the reasons why I recommend it for malware removal.
3. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.