Lookinews Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Lookinews pop-up notifications appear when you do not expect, bothering and annoying you. Still, that is way more than simple pop-up ads – their origins is clearly malignant, and they may bring other malicious stuff to your device. In this article, I will show you how to remove Lookinews push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Lookinews pop-ups will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the pages it can show you can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up notifications can also advertise fake online 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.

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What are Lookinews pop-up advertisements?

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-ups and Lookinews notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Common pop-up notifications are offered for you to enable with a benevolent purpose – keep you aware about the latest posts, discounts and so on. It is a useful tool to help your website to keep visitors and help the interested users to have the best deal.

Short summary of the Lookinews.com pop-up ads:
NameLookinews.com
HostingAS16509 Amazon.com, Inc.
Germany, Mörfelden-Walldorf
IP Address108.138.7.85
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorBestdealfortoday, Risont, News
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Lookinews pop-up ads, as opposed, have a deal with less legit web pages. You will generally observe the proposition to turn them on after a redirection from another page. It’s OK to see redirects unless it throws you to such a questionable place. At that point, enabling pop-up advertisements is offered as the anti-DDoS check. In other cases, the sites can deny showing you the content unless you enable these pop-up notifications. These demands should raise suspicion, as sites usually have a different anti-bot mechanism. Spectating this offer should be the reason to leave the page right away. Sometimes, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the web page – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up ads.

Lookinews push notification

Lookinews push notification.

How does this work?

Most of web browsers support enabling push notifications from websites. Sites, on the other hand, may send notifications with the content they like. It can be an advertisement of the product or a page published on this website, as well as a promotion of their partner page. As a result, you can see the pop-up from site X, but opening it will direct you to site Y – because a link to that website was added.

Cybercriminals rely on this feature in their approach to earn money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing the pop-ups, and then just spread numerous promotions of other crooks they have a deal with. As you can suppose, no normal companies will have a business with fraudsters. All the Lookinews popups you may see lead to other fraudulent sites. In some cases, the same user may get into a trap of multiple pop-up spamming websites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a negligible commission for one person, but when you can send ads to hundreds of victims and make it hundreds of times each day – that is a much bigger sum. Despite most of such banners are ineffective, it can still give all the participants a lot of money.

Are Lookinews pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they may look non-threatening – just a blinking pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you generally see in pop-up ads. Lookinews.com web page is controlled by crooks, who intentionally throw tons of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic push notifications into a storm of promotions. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But problems are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing that touches illegal ads, Lookinews push notifications don’t have legit deals to offer. Even when hackers make the banners looking similar to ones from well-known retailers, the web page these ads 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, Lookinews pop-up notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Lookinews pop-ups?

Fortunately, Lookinews pop-up ads removal is not very complicated. They sit in the web browser and can’t hide themselves among system files. However, as I pointed out before, some push notifications can introduce malware to your computer. It is nearly impossible to show all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is inconvenient. For that reason, after disabling the pop-up advertisements the best option is to use anti-malware software. That is especially recommended if you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-ups, and they still appeared. That can be a sign of adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware checkup purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and advanced detection system.

First and foremost, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that 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.

Tools tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

You can 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.

Reset Browser Settings tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

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. 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 browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your browser will connect the right DNS while connecting to the website 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 Lookinews 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.

GridinSoft Anti-Malware during the scan 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).

GridinSoft scan finished

How to Remove Lookinews Pop-ups?

Name: Lookinews

Description: Lookinews - 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 Lookinews.com push notifications?” or “why do Lookinews.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Lookinews 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 this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
  2. 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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