Remove Kafos.xyz Pop-up Virus — How to Remove?

Kafos.xyz pop-up notifications appear when you do not expect, distracting and annoying you. However, that is much more than annoying pop-ups – their nature is clearly malicious, and they can bring other malicious stuff to your system. In this article, I will show you how to remove Kafos.xyz pop-up notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Kafos.xyz pop-ups will be ineffective at best. At worst, the sites it can open may introduce malware to your system. These push notifications can also advertise fake shopping websites which will take your money and payment info. The latter generally ends up with losing all the money you have on the exposed card.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Kafos.xyz 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.

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What are Kafos.xyz pop-up 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 push notifications and Kafos.xyz notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal pop-up notifications 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 tool to help your site to keep visitors and help the interested ones to have the best deal.

Short summary of the Kafos.xyz pop-up ads:

Kafos.xyz pop-ups, on the other hand, are related to unlegit websites. You will generally see the proposition to turn them on following the redirection from another page. Redirects are OK unless it throws you to such a questionable place. At that point, enabling pop-ups is offered as the anti-DDoS check. Alternatively, the web pages may refuse to show you the contents unless you apply these push notifications. These demands should already raise suspicion, as sites usually feature a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Seeing such an demand is a reason to skip the site right away. 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.

Kafos.xyz push notification.

How does this work?

The vast majority of web browsers support turning on pop-ups from sites. Sites, on the other hand, can send out notifications with the content of their choice. It can be a promotion of the page listed for sale on this particular website, as well as an ad of the page of their partner. As a result, you can see the pop-up from site X, but opening it will direct you to website Y – because a referral link to the latter was built in.

Cybercriminals rely on this ability in their approach to gain money using illegal advertising. They trick users into turning on pop-ups, and after that just spread hundreds of banners of anyone they have a deal with. As you can suppose, no normal organisations will have a business with fraudsters. All the Kafos.xyz popups you may see lead to other untrustworthy sites. At some point, the same user may get into a trap of multiple pop-up spamming web pages, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The ads these rascals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a miserable commission for one person, but when you have hundreds of victims and show them hundreds of ads every day – that is a way bigger sum. Despite most of these banners are ineffective, it can still bring all the parties a lot of money.

Are Kafos.xyz pop-up ads dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they can look non-threatening – just a colourful window that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you generally see in pop-up advertisements. Kafos.xyz web page is controlled by crooks, who intendedly spread hundreds of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic push notifications into a hurricane of promotions. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But problems are not over at this point.

As any other thing that touches illegal ads, Kafos.xyz push notifications do not contain any legit offers. Even when crooks make the banners similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the website 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 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, Kafos.xyz pop-ups are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Kafos.xyz pop-ups?

Fortunately, Kafos.xyz push notifications removal is not very complicated. They sit in the web browser and cannot conceal themselves on a disk. However, as I stated before, some pop-up advertisements can deliver malicious software to your computer. It is hard to predict all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a poor idea. Thus, after removing the source of the pop-ups the best option is to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended if you have never clicked “Allow” to push notifications, but they still appeared. This situation can be a sign of malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware checkup purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and advanced detection system.

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

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 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:

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 Kafos.xyz 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 Kafos.xyz Pop-ups?

Name: Kafos.xyz

Description: Kafos.xyz - 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 Kafos.xyz push notifications?” or “why do Kafos.xyz pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Kafos.xyz 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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1. More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
2. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.