PinaView Virus — How to Remove Unwanted Ads?

PinaView pop-ups appear when you do not expect, disturbing and irritating you. Nonetheless, they are way more than annoying notifications – their essence is cleanly malignant, and they can install other malicious stuff to your system. In this post, I will show you how to remove PinaView push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with PinaView push notifications will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the pages it can show you can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements may also advertise fake shopping websites which will take your money and payment info. The latter generally ends up with losing all the money you have on the exposed card.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing PinaView manually may take hours and may damage your PC in the process. I recommend you to download GridinSoft Anti-Malware for threats removal. Allows to complete scan and cure your PC during the trial period.

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What are PinaView pop-up advertisements?

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 PinaView notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Common pop-ups are offered for you to enable with a benevolent purpose – notify you about the new articles, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful tool to help your website to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested visitors to have the best price.

Short summary of the Pinaview.com pop-up ads:

PinaView pop-up notifications, as opposed, have a deal with less legit sites. You will commonly see the offer to enable them following the redirection from another page. It’s OK to see redirects unless it throws you into such a questionable place. At that point, turning on pop-ups is offered under the guise of the anti-bot check. In other cases, the websites can deny showing you the content unless you enable these pop-up advertisements. These demands should already raise suspicion, as sites generally feature a different anti-bot mechanism. Seeing such an requirement is a reason to close the site right away. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not get to the web page – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up notifications.

PinaView push notification.

How does it work?

Most of web browsers support enabling push notifications from sites. Websites, on the other hand, can send out notifications with the content they like. It can be a promotion of the page listed for sale 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 direct you to website Y – because a referral link to that website was embedded.

Cybercriminals bear on this feature in their approach to gain money through advertising. They trick victims into turning on pop-ups, and then just spread hundreds of banners of anyone they have a deal with. As you may suppose, no legit organisations will contract with fraudsters. All the PinaView push ads you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. In some cases, the same user can get into a trap of multiple pop-up spamming sites, 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 payment for one person, but when you have a huge number of users and show them hundreds of ads every day – that is a way bigger sum. Even though most of these banners are ineffective, it may still bring all the parties a lot of money.

Are PinaView pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look harmless – just a blinking pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-ups. Pinaview.com web page is ruled by fraudsters, who deliberately show tons of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can make sporadic pop-ups into a hurricane of ads. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all problems these pop-up ads carry.

As with any other thing related to illegal advertising, PinaView pop-ups lack legit offers. Even when crooks make the ads similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the website 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-up advertisements 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, PinaView pop-up ads are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove PinaView pop-ups?

Fortunately, PinaView pop-up ads removal is not very complicated. They sit in the browser and can’t conceal themselves in the system. Nevertheless, as I told before, some pop-ups can promote malicious software to your computer. It is nearly impossible to predict all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a bad idea. Thus, after disabling the pop-ups it is recommended to use anti-malware software. I’d especially recommend that if you have never allowed pop-up ads, but they still appeared. This situation may be a sign of malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both system recovery and malware removal purposes, thanks to 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, 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.

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:

1. Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option:

2. 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. In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:

After choosing this option, you will see the next message:

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 website you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following lines²:

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 PinaView 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).

1. More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
2. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.