How to remove Misground pop-ups? — Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Misground push notifications appear when you do not expect, distracting and annoying you. However, they are slightly more than annoying notifications – their nature is purely malignant, and they may bring other malicious stuff to your device. In this post, I will show you how to remove Misground pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.

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

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What are Misground 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 ads and Misground pop-ups is the malignant origins of the latter. Common push notifications are offered for you to enable with a straightforward purpose – keep you aware about the latest articles, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful thing to help your site to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested visitors to have the best price.

Short summary of the Misground.com pop-up ads:
NameMisground.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address104.21.65.170
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorRitingsynther, Ughtsustacheds, Datingadventure
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Misground pop-up notifications, as opposed, are related to less legit web pages. You will generally witness the proposition to turn them on after a redirection from another website. Redirects are OK unless they throw you to such a dubious place. In this case, enabling pop-ups is offered as the anti-bot check. Alternatively, the sites may deny showing you the content unless you turn on these pop-up notifications. These demands should already raise suspicion, as websites generally feature a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Spectating this requirement is a reason to leave the website right away. Sometimes, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the site – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the push notifications.

Misground push notification

Misground push notification.

How does it work?

Most of web browsers support turning on pop-ups from websites. Sites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content of their choice. It can be an advertisement of the product published on this site, as well as a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you can see the push notification from site X, but interacting with it will redirect you to site Y – because a link to the latter was embedded.

Cyber burglars bear on this ability in their approach to gain money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing the pop-ups, and then just spread hundreds of ads of anyone they have a deal with. As you may suppose, no image-caring organisations will have a business with fraudsters. All the Misground popups you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. At some point, the same victim may be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming websites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The ads these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a miserable pay for one view, but when you have a huge number of victims and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a much bigger sum. Despite the majority of these ads giving no result at all, it can still give all the participants a lot of money.

Are Misground pop-up ads dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they can look harmless – just a colourful window that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the things this window promotes differ drastically from what you generally see in push notifications. Misground.com site is ruled by fraudsters, who deliberately spread hundreds and thousands of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any common sense and can make sporadic pop-up notifications into a storm of promotions. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But troubles are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing that touches illegal ads, Misground pop-up notifications don’t have legit offers. Even though hackers make the banners looking similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the site 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 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, Misground pop-ups are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Misground pop-ups?

Fortunately, Misground push notifications removal is pretty easy. They reside in the web browser and cannot hide themselves on a disk. However, as I told above, some pop-up advertisements may introduce malware to your computer. It is nearly impossible to describe all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is inconvenient. Therefore, after getting rid of the pop-up notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that if you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up advertisements, but they still appeared. This situation may be a sign of malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware scanning purposes, because of its abilities of system recovery and multi-layer detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to accomplish in manual or automated way. The former, obviously, requires 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 Misground 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 Misground Pop-ups?

Name: Misground

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