How to remove Personal-scan pop-ups? — Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Personal-scan pop-up notifications may show up unexpectedly, covering the post of the website you went to or opening your web browser when you do not need it to be opened.

Clicking on the Personal-scan promotion can lead to the injection of different malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the guide of Personal-scan popups clearing in multiple ways, and also checking your personal computer for other viruses presence.

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What are Personal-scan pop-ups?

Personal-scan popups are a result of adware action. Adware is a type of malware that suggests you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which creates a significant amount of revenue for adware distributors. These ads might contain sometimes shocking material, or have a link to malevolent content/website, because adware maintainers have no purpose to check the goodness of the material they are going to reveal – their single target is cash.

Personal-scan push notification

Personal-scan push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is a good, cheap and also very successful marketing instrument1. It permits the seller to attach the customers’ attention to their site, as well as the buyers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they intend to buy. When the person will receive a pop-up notification that the TV set he wishes to buy is offered at the online store he/she checked out previously with a 15% price cut, one will surely use this chance and purchase it. Taking into consideration the exceptionally low cost for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising and marketing tool is a favorite thing among the marketing teams of big online stores.

Nevertheless, such a rewarding system could not be missed by malware creators. Potential to show the popup advertisements forcibly to the people of malware invasion is a perfect basis for malevolent manipulations with the popup promotions. And Personal-scan.com promotions is among hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a summary for the Personal-scan site
SitePersonal-scan.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
Infection TypeAdware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address188.114.96.3
SymptomsAnnoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behaviorCleanyourpcnow, Antivirus, Flowerbothsystem
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Personal-scan virus?

There are a lot of methods of becoming infected by the adware that create the Personal-scan popups storm. A lion’s part of this malware cases is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Free software may also be downloaded from the official site, and the adware is delivered as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A plenty of individuals regularly use the uncertain programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, different utilities that are free, and even hacked programs. Every one of these sorts of software are risky, because it is extremely simple to integrate a Personal-scan malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

Personal-scan popup malware may additionally be hidden in the advertisement somewhere on the odd website. Such web pages are usually full of colorful and blinking ads, and their proprietors often permit any promotions to be placed on their page. Therefore, clicking on such banners is a risky thing: only the advertisement provider realizes what will occur when you click this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or unwanted programs, you can additionally receive something much more hazardous, 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 unwanted programs, like Personal-scan popup virus can initiate a lot of problems on your personal computer. Distracting is not the single problem – pop-up notifications can show you the advertisements, where you are offered to download another strange application, or “a perfect security tool”. Scareware is often spread under the last motto. Potentially undesirable applications, in turn, can have spyware functionality. And it is pretty hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a legit one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and fake antiviruses, popup-related promotions are also exploited as a distribution way by different trojan viruses, for example – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such viruses is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you several 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 situation can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without information loss. It is recommended to wipe out the viruses with antivirus applications as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Personal-scan pop-up advertisements?

The manual of Personal-scan adware removal consists of 2 sections. First, we need to deal with the malware, and afterwards take care of the effects of its activity. The elimination process is very simple, due to the fact that it can be executed even with the use of Microsoft Defender – security program that is present on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, due to its huge resources consumption, along with some problems that may be pivotal for some types of individuals, Defender is frequently disabled by the users, so its utilization is probably impossible. Additionally, different trojan viruses are capable to shut off the embedded antivirus. It is far better to make use of the separated program that will not have such vulnerabilities.

I’d recommend you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven anti-malware tool that will undoubtedly eliminate the malware from your personal computer and also create an invulnerable shield with a Proactive protection feature. But let’s handle Personal-scan adware initially.

Removing Personal-scan 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 Personal-scan 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 browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your web browser will be connected the accurate DNS while connecting to the web page you want. Make a text file named “hosts” on your 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.

However, there is one problem that makes the things a lot more difficult to restore, particularly without the anti-malware program. A lot of adware versions that are utilized to show you the Personal-scan pop-up ads are altering the deep browser settings, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to fix your browser settings after your computer was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly collapse soon. In some cases, you will see no crash, but significant lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 seconds, and after that it will be back to the normal, up until you attempt 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 Personal-scan Pop-ups?

Name: Personal-scan

Description: Personal-scan - 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 Personal-scan.com push notifications?” or “why do Personal-scan.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Personal-scan 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 the reasons why I suggest it for malware removal.
  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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