Life-Change-About Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Life-Change-About pop-up notices may appear unexpectedly, covering the post of the site you visited or opening your browser when you do not want it to be opened.

Clicking the Life-Change-About promotion can trigger the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the manual of Life-Change-About popups clearing in multiple methods, as well as checking your system for extra viruses existence.

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What are Life-Change-About pop-ups?

Life-Change-About popups are a consequence of adware presence. Adware is a type of malware that demonstrates to you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click advertisements, which produces a large amount of revenue for adware representatives. These advertisements might have sometimes shocking composition, or have a web link to malevolent content/website, considering that adware maintainers have no purpose to inspect the goodness of the material they are going to show – their single target is money.

Life-Change-About push notification

Life-Change-About push notification.

Pop-up promotions itself is a good, affordable and very efficient advertising tool1. It permits the seller to attach the customers’ attention to their site, as well as the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they intend to purchase. When the person will get a pop-up alert that the TV set he wishes to buy is provided at the online store he/she checked out earlier with a 15% discount, one will definitely use this opportunity and buy it. Taking into consideration the extremely small cost for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising tool is a favourite thing amidst the advertising departments of big online sellers.

However, such a rewarding scheme could not be missed by virus creators. Option to show the popup ads forcibly to the victims of malware attack is an ideal basis for malicious manipulations with the popup advertisements. And Life-change-about.me ads is one of hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a details for the Life-Change-About
Site Life-change-about.me
Hosting AS60781 LeaseWeb Netherlands B.V.
Netherlands, Amsterdam
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 95.168.170.165
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior Hienaterests, Ositieonthat, Financesurvey24
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Life-Change-About virus?

There are a plenty of ways of becoming infected by the adware that lead to the Life-Change-About popups storm. A lion’s part of this computer virus incidents is after the free software or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Free software can additionally be downloaded from the official website, and the adware is supplied as a legitimate 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 perhaps hacked programs. Every one of these kinds of programs are risky, since it is quite simple to build in a Life-Change-About malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Life-Change-About popup malware may additionally be concealed in the advertisement somewhere on the unusual website. Such websites are in most cases filled with intense and blinking advertisements, and their owners usually approve any promos to be published on their page. Thus, clicking on such banners is a shot in the dark: only the ad provider knows what will occur when you click this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you can likewise get something much more dangerous, like ransomware or coin miner; the big share of coin miners distribution is exactly after the malicious ads.

People dislike popups

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

Potentially undesirable applications, like Life-Change-About popup virus can cause a variety of problems on your computer. Distracting is not the only effect – pop-up notifications may present you the advertisements, where you are offered to download one more unknown application, or “a effective security tool”. Scareware is often distributed with the last motto. Potentially undesirable applications, in turn, can have spyware functions. And it is very hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a good one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and dubious antiviruses, popup-related banners are also chosen as a distribution method by different trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such viruses is 100% unwanted, and can cost you several hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not tapping these advertisements, they may be clicked by someone who also uses your personal computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to deal with it without information loss. It is recommended to eliminate the viruses with anti-malware applications as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Life-Change-About pop-up advertisements?

The manual of Life-Change-About adware clearing includes 2 parts. First, we need to eliminate the malware, and then correct the consequences of its action. The removal procedure is very simple, because it may be performed even with the use of Microsoft Defender – security program that is available on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nonetheless, due to its huge resources usage, along with some errors that can be crucial for some categories of users, Defender is frequently disabled by the users, so its use is likely impossible. Additionally, different trojan viruses have the ability to turn off the embedded antivirus. It is better to use the separated program that will not have such vulnerabilities.

I’d advise you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven anti-malware tool that will definitely erase the malware from your computer and make an impenetrable cover with a Proactive protection function. But let’s handle Life-Change-About adware first.

Removing Life-Change-About 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.
  • Gridinsoft Anti-Malware during the scan process

  • 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.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware scan results

  • When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Life-Change-About malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware - After Cleaning

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. 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 web browsers are reset, you need to make sure that your web browser will definitely be connected the accurate DNS while connecting to the web page you want. Create a text file named “hosts” on your computer’s desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following lines3:

# 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.

Nonetheless, there is one issue that makes things a lot harder to fix, especially without the anti-malware program. A lot of adware versions that are used to show you the Life-Change-About pop-up promotions are adjusting the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to fix your browser settings after your PC was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly crash soon. In some cases, you will see no crash, but significant lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 seconds, and then it will be back to the normal, up until you attempt to open settings one more time.

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.

Tools tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

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.

Reset Browser Settings tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

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.

How to Remove Life-Change-About Pop-ups?

Name: Life-Change-About

Description: Life-Change-About - 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 Life-change-about.me push notifications?” or “why do Life-change-about.me pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Life-Change-About 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 pop-up ads on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware overview and the reasons why I recommend it for malware removal.
  3. 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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