How to remove Notifstar pop-ups? — Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Notifstar pop-up notifications can appear out of the blue, covering the content of the site you visited or opening your browser when you do not desire it to be opened.

Clicking the Notifstar advertisement can result in the injection of other malware or unwanted programs. In this guide, you will see the guideline of Notifstar popups clearing in a couple of methods, and also examining your PC for extra malware existence.

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What are Notifstar pop-ups?

Notifstar popups are an effect of adware action. Adware is a sort of malware that presents you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click advertisements, which produces a substantial amount of earnings for adware suppliers. These advertisements may contain sometimes shocking information, or have a web link to harmful content/website, due to the fact that adware maintainers have no purpose to examine the goodness of the material they are going to show – their single target is cash.

Notifstar push notification

Notifstar push notification.

Pop-up promotions itself is a very good, low-cost and also really efficient advertising instrument1. It allows the seller to link the customers’ attention to their site, and the customers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they want to purchase. When the person will get a pop-up alert that the TV set he wishes to purchase is offered at the online shop he/she visited earlier with a 15% price cut, one will surely use this chance and purchase it. Taking into consideration the extremely low cost for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising tool is a much-loved thing amongst the advertising teams of huge online stores.

Nonetheless, such a successful scheme could not be missed by virus creators. Option to show the popup advertisements forcibly to the victims of malware attack is an ideal basis for evil-minded manipulations with the popup promotions. And Notifstar.com ads is among hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a summary for the Notifstar
Site Notifstar.com
Hosting AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 104.21.91.166
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior News, Cangomamblu, Severalsituations
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Notifstar virus?

There are a huge amount of ways of getting contaminated by the adware that trigger the Notifstar popups storm. A lion’s part of this computer virus instances is after the free software or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Freeware can also be downloaded from the main site, and the adware is presented as a legit bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A plenty of individuals frequently make use of the uncertain programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, a wide range of apps that are free, or even hacked programs. All of these sorts of applications are risky, because it is quite simple to integrate a Notifstar malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Notifstar popup malware can likewise be hidden in the promotion somewhere on the strange website. Such websites are typically full of colorful and blinking advertisements, and their proprietors usually approve any promos to be posted on their web page. For this reason, clicking on such banners is a risky thing: only the ad contractor realizes what will happen when you click this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or unwanted programs, you may additionally receive something far more unsafe, like ransomware or coin miner; the big share of coin miners circulation is exactly after the malicious promotions.

People dislike popups

The statistic shows that people dislike popup advertising more than other types of promotions

Potentially undesirable applications, like Notifstar popup virus may cause a variety of different troubles on your personal computer. Distracting is not the single problem – pop-ups may show you the promotions, where you are offered to get another unknown program, or “a effective anti-malware tool”. Scareware is usually spread with the use of the last slogun. Potentially undesirable applications, in turn, can have spyware functions. And it is quite hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a good one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related ads are also used as a distribution way by various trojan viruses, for example – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such malware is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you several hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not clicking these ads, they may be clicked by someone who also makes use of your personal computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the things can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to deal with it without data loss. It is recommended to wipe out the viruses with anti-malware applications as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Notifstar pop-up advertisements?

The manual of Notifstar adware clearing contains 2 sections. First, we need to remove the malware, and after that fix the consequences of its action. The removal process is quite simple, since it can be done even with using Microsoft Defender – anti-virus tool that is available on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. However, as a result of its significant resources consumption, as well as some failures that can be serious for some categories of individuals, Defender is oftentimes turned off by the users, so its utilization is most likely impossible. Additionally, a variety of trojan viruses can disable the embedded antivirus. It is far better to use the separated program that will not have such weakness.

I’d suggest you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven security device that will certainly erase the malware from your computer and create an invulnerable cover with a Proactive protection function. However, let’s take care of Notifstar adware first.

Removing Notifstar popup virus with GridinSoft Anti-Malware

  • Download and install GridinSoft Anti-Malware. After the installation, you will be offered to perform the Standard Scan. Approve this action.
  • Gridinsoft Anti-Malware during the scan process

  • Standard scan checks the logical disk where the system files are stored, together with the files of programs you have already installed. The scan lasts up to 6 minutes.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware scan results

  • When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Notifstar malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware - After Cleaning

Now, when the computer is clean of viruses, we can proceed to the browser reset. You can do this step manually, as well as with the use of GridinSoft Anti-Malware.

Reset browser settings to default

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 web browsers are reset, you need to make sure that your browser will be connected the accurate DNS while connecting to the website you want. Create a text file named “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following lines3:

# 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.

Nonetheless, there is one trouble that makes things a lot harder to fix, especially without the anti-malware software. A lot of adware versions that are used to show you the Notifstar pop-up advertisements are adjusting the deep browser setups, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to fix your browser settings after your PC was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly crash quickly. In some cases, you will see no crash, but large lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 secs, and afterwards it will be back to the normal, till you try to open settings again.

Reset your browser settings 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 the options for each browser. By default, they are set up in the manner which 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 last is also able to reset the HOSTS file without any additional commands.

How to Remove Notifstar Pop-ups?

Name: Notifstar

Description: Notifstar - 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 Notifstar.com push notifications?” or “why do Notifstar.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Notifstar 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 pop-up advertisements on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware overview and also the reasons why I recommend it for malware elimination.
  3. 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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