Pioxu.live pop-up advertisements appear when you do not expect, distracting and annoying you. Still, they are slightly more than annoying pop-ups – their essence is purely malignant, and they may install other malicious stuff to your device. In this post, I will guide you on how to remove Pioxu.live pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.
Any time you interact with Pioxu.live pop-up advertisements will be ineffective at best. In worst case scenario, the websites it can show you may introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups may also advertise fake 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 Pioxu.live pop-ups?
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 push notifications and Pioxu.live pop-ups is the malignant origins of the latter. Common pop-up ads are offered for you to enable with a understandable purpose – notify you about the latest articles, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful tool to help your site to keep visitors and help the interested users to have the best price.
Short summary of the Pioxu.live pop-up ads:
| Name | Pioxu.live |
| Hosting | AS20473 The Constant Company, LLC United States, Los Angeles |
| IP Address | 149.28.75.159 |
| Malware type | Adware1 |
| Effect | Unwanted pop-up advertisements |
| Hazard level | Medium |
| Malware source | Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites |
| Similar behavior | Boostcomputerf1, Fujitrk, Dergainisurvey |
| Removal method | To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC |
Pioxu.live pop-up ads, in contrast, have a deal with less legit web pages. You will generally witness the proposition to enable them after a redirection from another website. Redirects are OK unless they throw you to such a dubious place. At that point, enabling pop-up ads is served as the anti-bot check. Alternatively, the web pages may refuse to show you the contents unless you apply these pop-up notifications. These demands should already raise suspicion, as websites generally feature a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Spectating this offer should be the reason to leave the page right away. Sometimes, even when you click “Allow”, you will not get to the web page – the sole page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-ups.
Pioxu.live push notification.
How does this work?
Most of web browsers support turning on push notifications from sites. Websites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content they want. It may be a promotion of the page listed for sale on this particular site, as well as an ad of their partner page. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but opening it will direct you to website Y – because a referral link to that website was added.
Cyber burglars bear on this ability in their approach to earn money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing them to show the banners, and after that just spread hundreds of banners of anyone they contract with. As you may suppose, no benevolent companies will contract with fraudsters. All the Pioxu.live notifications you may 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 banners these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a negligible payment for one person, but when you can send ads to a huge number of victims and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a much bigger sum. Despite most of such banners are ineffective, it may still give all the participants a lot of profit.
Are Pioxu.live pop-up advertisements dangerous?
Yes, they are. At the surface, they may look safe – just a colourful window that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-up advertisements. Pioxu.live web page is ruled by fraudsters, who intentionally throw tons of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any common sense and can make sporadic pop-up advertisements into a storm of promotions. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all problems these pop-up advertisements carry.
As any other thing that touches illegal advertising, Pioxu.live pop-up ads don’t have legit offers. Even when crooks make the banners similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the web page these ads will throw you to are completely different. And these pages may 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, Pioxu.live pop-up notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.
How to remove Pioxu.live pop-ups?
Fortunately, Pioxu.live pop-up advertisements removal is not very complicated. They reside in the browser and cannot conceal themselves on a disk. Nonetheless, as I told before, some pop-up advertisements can deliver malicious software to your system. It is hard to predict all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a bad idea. For that reason, after removing the source of the pop-up notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended in the case when you have never allowed pop-ups, and they still appeared. That may be a sign of malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both system recovery and malware checkup purposes, thanks to its abilities of system recovery and advanced detection system.
First of all, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that 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:
- 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 website 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 Pioxu.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 Pioxu.live Pop-ups?
Name: Pioxu.live
Description: Pioxu.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 Pioxu.live push notifications?” or “why do Pioxu.live pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Pioxu.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.
