Misarena pop-ups appear out of the blue, detracting and irritating you. Nonetheless, that is much more than annoying pop-ups – their origins is clearly malicious, and they may introduce other malicious stuff to your computer. In this post, I will show you the guide how to remove Misarena pop-up notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.
Any interaction with Misarena push notifications will be useless at best. At worst, the pages it can open may introduce malware to your system. These push notifications can also advertise fake 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.
What are Misarena pop-ups?
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-up advertisements and Misarena pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal pop-ups are offered for you to enable with a benevolent purpose – keep you aware about the fresh posts, discounts and so on. It is a useful thing to help your site to keep visitors and help the interested ones to have the best deal.
Brief description of the Misarena.com pop-up ads:
Name | Misarena.com |
Hosting | AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc. United States, San Francisco |
IP Address | 188.114.97.3 |
Malware type | Adware1 |
Effect | Unwanted pop-up advertisements |
Hazard level | Medium |
Malware source | Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites |
Similar behavior | Lovelydating, Goadscenter, Mackled |
Removal method | To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC |
Misarena pop-up advertisements, in contrast, are related to unlegit sites. You will generally observe the proposition to enable them following the redirection from another website. Redirects are OK unless they throw you to such a questionable place. In this case, enabling push notifications is served as the anti-bot filtering. Alternatively, the sites can refuse to show you the contents unless you enable these pop-ups. These requirements should be the red flag, as sites generally have a different anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing such an requirement should be the reason to close the page doubtlessly. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not see the website – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the push notifications.
How does it work?
The vast majority of browsers support turning on pop-ups from sites. Sites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content of their choice. It may be an advertisement of the product or a page listed for sale on this site, as well as an ad of the page of their partner. As a result, you can see the pop-up from site X, but opening it will throw you to site Y – because a link to that website was added.
Cybercriminals bear on this feature in their approach to gain money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing the pop-ups, and after that just spread hundreds of promotions of other crooks they have a deal with. As you may suppose, no normal companies will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Misarena popups you may see lead to other fraudulent sites. In some cases, the same user can be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming sites, and its 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 commission for one viewer, but when you have hundreds of victims and make it hundreds of times each day – that is a much bigger sum. Despite most of such banners giving no result at all, it may still bring all the parties a lot of profit.
Are Misarena push notifications dangerous?
Yes, they are. Initially, they may look safe – just a colourful pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the things this window promotes differ sharply from what you used to see in pop-up advertisements. Misarena.com website is ruled by crooks, who deliberately show hundreds of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any common sense and can launch sporadic push notifications into a hurricane of ads. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But problems are not over at this point.
As with any other thing related to illegal advertising, Misarena pop-up notifications don’t have legit offers. Even when hackers make the ads similar to ones from well-known retailers, the web page these banners 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-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, Misarena 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 Misarena pop-ups?
Fortunately, Misarena pop-up ads removal is pretty easy. They parasite in the browser and cannot conceal themselves among system files. However, as I stated above, some push notifications can deliver malicious software to your system. It is hard to describe all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a bad idea. Thus, after getting rid of the pop-up notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended in the case when you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up advertisements, and they still appeared. This situation can be a sign of adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both system recovery and malware scanning purposes, because of its abilities of system recovery and advanced detection system.
First of all, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to accomplish 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.
You may 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.
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:
- Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option:
- 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:
- Open Menu tab (three strips in upper right corner) and click the “Help” button. In the appeared menu choose “troubleshooting information”:
- In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:
After choosing this option, you will see the next message:
If you use Google Chrome
- Open Settings tab, find the “Advanced” button. In the extended tab choose the “Reset and clean up” button:
- In the appeared list, click on the “Restore settings to their original defaults”:
- 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
- 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:
- 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 Misarena 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.
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).
How to Remove Misarena Pop-ups?
Name: Misarena
Description: Misarena - 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 Misarena.com push notifications?” or “why do Misarena.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Misarena 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
User Review
( votes)References
- More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
- Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.