Lightredstep Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Lightredstep pop-up notifications may show up out of the blue, covering the material of the page you visited or opening your web browser when you do not want it to be opened.

Clicking on the Lightredstep ad can cause the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this post, you will see the guide of Lightredstep popups removal in several ways, as well as inspecting your computer for additional malware existence.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Lightredstep 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 Lightredstep pop-ups?

Lightredstep popups are a result of adware presence. Adware is a kind of malware that suggests you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which generates a large amount of income for adware representatives. These promotions may consist of sometimes shocking material, or have a link to malicious content/website, because adware maintainers have no reason to examine the goodness of the material they are going to show – their solitary target is cash.

Lightredstep push notification.

Pop-up promotions itself is a very good, affordable and also really efficient marketing instrument¹. It permits the seller to link the customers’ attention to their website, and the buyers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they wish to purchase. When the consumer will receive a pop-up notification that the TV set he likes to buy is available at the online store he/she visited earlier with a 15% discount, one will surely use this opportunity and purchase it. Considering the exceptionally low price for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising instrument is a favourite thing amidst the marketing departments of big internet stores.

Nevertheless, such a profitable system could not be missed by virus developers. Potential to demonstrate the popup ads by force to the people of malware attack is a great basis for malicious tricks with the popup ads. And Lightredstep.com promotions is among hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a info for the Lightredstep site

How have I got the Lightredstep virus?

There are a huge amount of ways of getting contaminated by the adware that result in the Lightredstep popups tornado. A lion’s part of this malware instances is after the free software or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Free software can also be downloaded from the official site, and the adware is presented as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A lot of people regularly utilize the uncertain programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, various utilities that are free, and even hacked programs. Every one of these sorts of applications are dangerous, because it is extremely simple to build in a Lightredstep malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

Lightredstep popup virus may additionally be concealed in the advertisement somewhere on the odd website. Such web pages are generally packed with colorful and blinking ads, and their proprietors typically approve any promotions to be placed on their web page. Thus, 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 undesirable programs, you can likewise receive something a lot more risky, like ransomware or coin miner; the big share of coin miners circulation is exactly after the malicious advertisements.

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

Potentially unwanted applications, like Lightredstep pop-up virus may cause a lot of problems on your computer. Distracting is not the single problem – pop-ups can display you the ads, where you are offered to get one more strange program, or “a effective security tool”. Scareware is usually spread under the last slogun. Potentially undesirable programs, in turn, may have spyware functions. And it is pretty hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a good one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and dubious antiviruses, popup-related ads are also chosen as a spreading way by various trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such malware is 100% unwanted, and can cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And even if you are not tapping these promotions, they may be clicked by someone who also uses your computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the things may become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without information loss. It is recommended to wipe out the viruses with antivirus programs as soon as possible.

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

The tutorial of Lightredstep adware removal contains 2 sections. Initially, we need to deal with the malware, and after that deal with the effects of its activity. The removal task is pretty simple, because it can be executed even with the use of Microsoft Defender – security software that is available on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nonetheless, due to its large resources consumption, along with some failures that may be critical for some kinds of individuals, Defender is frequently turned off by the users, so its use is probably impossible. In addition, various trojan viruses have the ability to turn off the embedded antivirus. It is much better to make use of the separated program that will not have such vulnerabilities.

I would certainly suggest you to use Gridinsoft Anti-Malware² – a well-proven antivirus device that will certainly erase the malware from your system and make an impenetrable cover with a Proactive protection feature. However, let’s take care of Lightredstep adware initially.

Removing Lightredstep 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 Lightredstep 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 web browser will definitely be connected the proper DNS while connecting to the site you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following lines³:

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 problem that makes the things much harder to repair, especially without the anti-malware software. A lot of adware variants that are utilized to show you the Lightredstep pop-up ads are altering the deep browser settings, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to fix your browser settings after your machine was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will collapse quickly. In some cases, you will see no crash, but significant lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 secs, and then it will be back to the typical, till you try to open settings again.

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.

How to Remove Lightredstep Pop-ups?

Name: Lightredstep

Description: Lightredstep - 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 Lightredstep.com push notifications?” or “why do Lightredstep.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Lightredstep 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 pop-up advertisements on Wikipedia.
2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware review and also the reasons why I suggest it for malware removal.
3. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.