Pioxe.live pop-ups appear when you do not expect, distracting and irritating you. Still, they are much more than just notifications – their origins is clearly malicious, and they may install other malicious stuff to your system. In this post, I will show you the guide how to remove Pioxe.live pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.
Any interaction with Pioxe.live pop-up advertisements will be ineffective at best. In worst case scenario, the web pages it can throw you to may introduce malware to your system. These push notifications may also advertise fake online 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.
What are Pioxe.live 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-ups and Pioxe.live pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Common pop-up advertisements are offered for you to enable with a benevolent purpose – notify you about the fresh publications, discounts and so on. It is a useful tool to help your website to retain visitors and help the interested ones to have the best price.
Brief description of the Pioxe.live pop-up ads:
| Name | Pioxe.live |
| Hosting | AS14061 DigitalOcean, LLC Netherlands, Amsterdam |
| IP Address | 164.90.196.46 |
| Malware type | Adware1 |
| Effect | Unwanted pop-up advertisements |
| Hazard level | Medium |
| Malware source | Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites |
| Similar behavior | Performintenselydevelopedinfo, Misridgefield, Advertmony |
| Removal method | To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC |
Pioxe.live pop-up advertisements, in contrast, are related to untrustworthy web pages. You will generally see the proposition to turn them on after a redirection from another page. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless it throws you to such a dubious place. In this case, enabling pop-up notifications is offered as the anti-DDoS check. In other cases, the web pages may deny showing you the contents unless you turn on these pop-up advertisements. These theses should already be the red flag, as sites generally have a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing this requirement is a reason to close the site right away. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not see the website – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up advertisements.
Pioxe.live push notification.
How does it work?
The vast majority of browsers support enabling pop-ups from sites. Websites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content of their choice. It may be an advertisement of the product posted on this website, as well as an ad of their partner page. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but clicking it will direct you to site Y – because a link to the latter was added.
Cyber burglars rely on this ability in their attempt to gain money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing the pop-ups, and after that just spread numerous banners of other crooks they have a deal with. As you can suppose, no benevolent companies will contract with fraudsters. All the Pioxe.live push ads you may see lead to other fraudulent sites. In some cases, 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 commonly provides a negligible payment for one person, but when you have a huge number of victims and make it hundreds of times every day – that is a way bigger sum. Despite the majority of such ads giving no result at all, it may still give all the participants a lot of money.
Are Pioxe.live pop-up notifications dangerous?
Yes, they are. Initially, they can look safe – just a colourful window that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the things this window promotes differ sharply from what you used to see in pop-ups. Pioxe.live web page is controlled by crooks, who deliberately spread hundreds of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can make sporadic push notifications into a storm of banners. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all problems these pop-ups carry.
As with any other thing that touches illegal ads, Pioxe.live pop-up ads lack legit deals to offer. Even when hackers make the banners similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, 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 pop-ups 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, Pioxe.live push notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.
How to remove Pioxe.live pop-ups?
Fortunately, Pioxe.live pop-up advertisements removal is pretty easy. They reside in the web browser and cannot hide themselves on a disk. Nevertheless, as I stated before, some pop-ups can promote malicious programs to your system. It is nearly impossible to describe all of the cases, and manual malware removal is a bad idea. For that reason, after getting rid of the pop-up advertisements the best option is to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended if you have never clicked “Allow” to push notifications, and they still appeared. This situation can be a sign of adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware scanning and removal purposes, because of its abilities of system recovery and superb detection system.
First and foremost, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to do in both manual and automatic manner. The former, obviously, requires more time to complete and can 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 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.
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:
- Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option:
- 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:
- Open Menu tab (three strips in upper right corner) and click the “Help” button. In the appeared menu choose “troubleshooting information”:
- In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:
After choosing this option, you will see the next message:
If you use Google Chrome
- Open Settings tab, find the “Advanced” button. In the extended tab choose the “Reset and clean up” button:
- In the appeared list, click on the “Restore settings to their original defaults”:
- 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
- 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:
- 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 site 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 Pioxe.live 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).
How to Remove Pioxe.live Pop-ups?
Name: Pioxe.live
Description: Pioxe.live - 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 Pioxe.live push notifications?” or “why do Pioxe.live pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Pioxe.live 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
User Review
( votes)References
- More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
- Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.
