Remove Mentbradshed Virus — How to Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Mentbradshed push notifications appear out of the blue, detracting and irritating you. Still, they are slightly more than annoying pop-ups – their essence is surely malignant, and they may bring other malware to your device. In this article, I will show you the guide how to remove Mentbradshed push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Mentbradshed push notifications will be ineffective at best. In worst case scenario, the websites it can throw you to can introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups may also promote 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.

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What are Mentbradshed 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 Mentbradshed pop-ups is the malignant origins of the latter. Common pop-up advertisements are offered for you to enable on different sites with a legitimate purpose – notify you about the fresh articles, discounts and so on. It is a useful thing to help your website to retain visitors and help the interested users to have the best deal.

Short summary of the Mentbradshed.com pop-ups:
NameMentbradshed.com
HostingAS14618 Amazon.com, Inc.
United States, Ashburn
IP Address52.20.131.174
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorTozimg, Removeadsaddon, Dollarsurvey
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Mentbradshed pop-ups, on the other hand, are related to untrustworthy sites. You will commonly witness the offer to turn them on following the redirection from another page. It’s OK to see redirects unless they throw you to such a dubious place. At that point, turning on push notifications is served as the anti-DDoS filtering. In other cases, the websites can deny showing you the contents unless you turn on these pop-up advertisements. These theses should be the red flag, as sites usually feature a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Seeing this requirement is a reason to leave the website doubtlessly. Sometimes, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not get to the site – the sole page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-ups.

Mentbradshed push notification

Mentbradshed push notification.

How does this work?

The vast majority of browsers support turning on push notifications from websites. Websites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content they want. It can be an advertisement of the product or a page published on this website, or an ad of the page of their partner. As a result, you can see the push notification from site X, but opening it will throw you to website Y – because a referral link to that website was built in.

Crooks bear on this feature in their approach to gain money using illegal advertising. They trick victims into allowing the pop-ups, and then just spread hundreds of promotions of anyone they have a deal with. As you can suppose, no benevolent organisations will contract with fraudsters. All the Mentbradshed notifications you may see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same victim may get into a trap of multiple pop-up spamming websites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The ads these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a negligible pay for one view, but when you have a huge number of victims and make it hundreds of times every day – that is a much more significant sum. Even though the majority of such banners giving no result at all, it may still give all the participants a lot of profit.

Are Mentbradshed pop-ups dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they may look harmless – just a colourful window that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the things this window promotes differ sharply from what you generally see in pop-up notifications. Mentbradshed.com site is controlled by crooks, who deliberately throw tons of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can make sporadic push notifications into a hurricane of promotions. For weak computers, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all problems these pop-ups carry.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing that touches illegal ads, Mentbradshed pop-up ads lack legit offers. Even though hackers make the banners similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the web page 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 push notifications 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, Mentbradshed pop-ups are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Mentbradshed pop-ups?

Fortunately, Mentbradshed pop-up ads removal is pretty easy. They sit in the browser and can’t conceal themselves on a disk. Nevertheless, as I told before, some pop-ups may introduce malicious programs to your computer. It is nearly impossible to predict all of the cases, and manual malware removal is inconvenient. Therefore, after disabling the pop-up ads it is recommended to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that if you have never allowed pop-ups, and they still appeared. This situation may be a sign of malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both system recovery and malware scanning and removal purposes, thanks to its abilities of system recovery and multi-component 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 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 site 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 Mentbradshed 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 Mentbradshed Pop-ups?

Name: Mentbradshed

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