Remove Mafirst.site Pop-up Virus — How to Remove?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Mafirst.site push notifications appear when you do not expect, bothering and annoying you. However, that is way more than annoying pop-ups – their essence is clearly malicious, and they can bring other malware to your device. In this post, I will guide you on how to remove Mafirst.site pop-up notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Mafirst.site pop-up advertisements will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the sites it can open can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up notifications can also promote fake online shopping sites 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 Mafirst.site push 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 pop-ups and Mafirst.site notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Common pop-ups are offered for you to enable on different sites with a understandable purpose – notify you about the fresh posts, discounts and so on. It is a useful thing to help your site to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested users to have the best deal.

Short summary of the Mafirst.site pop-up ads:
NameMafirst.site
HostingAS14061 DigitalOcean, LLC
United States, North Bergen
IP Address167.99.236.85
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorMeetsurvey, Datingcentral, Newsnourish
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Mafirst.site pop-ups, in contrast, are related to untrustworthy websites. You will generally witness the proposition to enable them after a redirection from another page. It’s OK to see redirects unless it throws you into such a questionable place. At that point, turning on pop-up ads is offered under the guise of the anti-bot filtering. Alternatively, the websites may refuse to show you the contents unless you enable these pop-up ads. These requirements should raise suspicion, as sites commonly have a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Spectating this demand should be the reason to skip the website doubtlessly. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not get to the website – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-ups.

Mafirst.site push notification

Mafirst.site push notification.

How does it work?

Most of browsers support turning on push notifications from websites. Sites, on the other hand, may send notifications with the content they like. It may be an advertisement of the product posted on this website, as well as an ad of their partner page. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but interacting with it will direct you to website Y – because a referral link to the latter was built in.

Scoundrels bear on this feature in their attempt to gain money using illegal advertising. They trick victims into allowing them to show the banners, and after that just spread hundreds of banners of anyone they contract with. As you can suppose, no image-caring organisations will contract with fraudsters. All the Mafirst.site popups you may see lead to other untrustworthy sites. At some point, the same user may get into a trap of several pop-up spamming websites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The promotions these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a negligible commission for one viewer, but when you have a huge number of victims and make it hundreds of times every day – that is a much bigger sum. Even though the majority of these ads are ineffective, it can still give all the participants a lot of money.

Are Mafirst.site pop-up ads dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they may look harmless – just a colourful pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the things this window promotes differ drastically from what you generally see in pop-up ads. Mafirst.site web page is ruled by fraudsters, who intentionally spread hundreds and thousands of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic pop-up ads into a hurricane of banners. For weak computers, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all problems these pop-up advertisements carry.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing related to illegal ads, Mafirst.site pop-ups don’t have legit offers. Even when hackers make the banners similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the site these ads will throw you to are completely different. And these pages may 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-ups 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, Mafirst.site pop-ups are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Mafirst.site pop-ups?

Fortunately, Mafirst.site pop-up ads removal is not very complicated. They reside in the browser and cannot conceal themselves in the system. Nonetheless, as I told above, some pop-up advertisements may promote malicious software to your system. It is hard to describe all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is inconvenient. For that reason, after disabling the pop-ups it is recommended to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that in the case when you have never allowed pop-up advertisements, but they still appeared. That may point at malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both system recovery and malware scanning and removal purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and superb detection system.

Initially, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to do in both manual and automatic manner. The former, obviously, takes more time to complete and may 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 web page 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 Mafirst.site 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 Mafirst.site Pop-ups?

Name: Mafirst.site

Description: Mafirst.site - 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 Mafirst.site push notifications?” or “why do Mafirst.site pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Mafirst.site 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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