Open.hillsword.top Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Open.hillsword.top pop-up notifications can appear out of the blue, covering the material of the website you went to or opening your web browser when you don’t need it to be opened.

Clicking on the Open.hillsword.top advertisement can cause the injection of other malware or unwanted programs. In this guide, you will see the guideline of Open.hillsword.top popups removal in various manners, and also checking your personal computer for additional malware presence.

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What are Open.hillsword.top pop-ups?

Open.hillsword.top popups are a consequence of adware activity. Adware is a kind of malware that suggests you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click promotions, which generates a massive volume of earnings for adware distributors. These promotions might include sometimes shocking composition, or have a link to harmful content/website, because adware maintainers have no purpose to check the goodness of the material they are going to show – their solitary target is money.

Open.hillsword.top push notification

Open.hillsword.top push notification.

Pop-up promotions itself is a good, low-cost and also extremely efficient marketing method1. It allows the seller to attach the customers’ attention to their site, and the customers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they wish to buy. When the person will get a pop-up notification that the TV set he desires to purchase is offered at the online shop he/she checked out earlier with a 15% discount, one will surely use this opportunity and get it. Taking into consideration the incredibly small cost for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising instrument is a favorite thing among the marketing teams of large online retail stores.

Nonetheless, such a successful strategy could not be missed by virus creators. Ability to show the popup advertisements forcibly to the targets of malware attack is an ideal basis for evil-minded tricks with the popup advertisements. And Open.hillsword.top advertisements is among hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a info for the Open.hillsword.top site
SiteOpen.hillsword.top
HostingAS24940 Hetzner Online GmbH
Germany, Bamberg
Infection TypeAdware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address116.202.184.109
SymptomsAnnoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behaviorNews, Festaykay, Rplnd56
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Open.hillsword.top virus?

There are a huge amount of methods of becoming contaminated by the adware that cause the Open.hillsword.top popups storm. A lion’s part of this virus incidents is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Freeware can additionally be downloaded from the main web page, and the adware is provided as a legitimate bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A huge amount of users frequently utilize the dubious programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, various utilities that are free of cost, or perhaps hacked programs. Every one of these kinds of software are risky, because it is quite easy to integrate a Open.hillsword.top malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Open.hillsword.top popup malware may additionally be hidden in the promotion somewhere on the strange site. Such websites are generally packed with colorful and blinking ads, and their owners often permit any promos to be posted on their web page. Therefore, clicking such banners is a shot in the dark: only the advertisement contractor knows what will happen when you click this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or unwanted programs, you may additionally receive something much more dangerous, like ransomware or coin miner; the large 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 programs, like Open.hillsword.top popup virus may initiate a lot of troubles on your PC. Distracting is not the single effect – pop-up notifications may show you the ads, where you are offered to get one more dubious program, or “a perfect anti-malware tool”. Scareware is often distributed with the last slogun. Potentially undesirable applications, in turn, may have spyware functions. And it is pretty hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a legit one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and dubious antiviruses, popup-related ads are also chosen as a spreading way by different trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such malware is 100% unwanted, and can cost you hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not interacting with these ads, they may be clicked by someone who also uses your PC – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the things can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without data loss. It is recommended to remove the viruses with antivirus programs as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Open.hillsword.top pop-up advertisements?

The tutorial of Open.hillsword.top adware elimination includes 2 sections. First, we need to get rid of the malware, and then deal with the results of its activity. The removal procedure is quite simple, because it may be done even with making use of Microsoft Defender – security software that is present on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, as a result of its large resources consumption, along with some problems that can be pivotal for some groups of individuals, Defender is often turned off by the users, so its utilization is most likely impossible. Furthermore, various trojan viruses can shut off the embedded antivirus. It is far better to make use of the separated program that will not have such exposures.

I would certainly advise you to use Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven security tool that will definitely remove the viruses from your personal computer and also create an impenetrable cover with a Proactive protection feature. However, let’s deal with Open.hillsword.top adware first.

Removing Open.hillsword.top 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 Open.hillsword.top 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 ensure that your web browser will be connected the appropriate DNS while connecting to the web page you want. Create a text file named “hosts” on your desktop, then open it and fill it with the following content3:

# 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 issue that makes the things a lot harder to restore, specifically without the anti-malware software. A lot of adware variants that are utilized to show you the Open.hillsword.top pop-up ads are modifying the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to fix your browser settings after your system was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will crash soon. In some cases, you will see no crash, however, large lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 secs, and afterwards it will be back to the normal, up until you try to open settings once more.

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 Open.hillsword.top Pop-ups?

Name: Open.hillsword.top

Description: Open.hillsword.top - 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 Open.hillsword.top push notifications?” or “why do Open.hillsword.top pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Open.hillsword.top 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 ads on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware review and 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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