Remove Plotil Pop-up Virus — How to Remove?

Plotil push notifications appear out of the blue, bothering and annoying you. Still, they are way more than simple pop-up ads – their essence is cleanly malicious, and they may introduce other malware to your computer. In this post, I will show you the guide how to remove Plotil pop-up notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Plotil push notifications will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the web pages it can show you may introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups can 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.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Plotil 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 Plotil 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 Plotil notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal pop-up ads are offered for you to enable with a benevolent purpose – keep you aware about the latest articles, discounts and so on. It is a useful tool to help your website to retain visitors and help the interested visitors to have the best deal.

Brief summary of the Plotil.com pop-up ads:

Plotil push notifications, in contrast, are related to untrustworthy sites. You will commonly see the offer to turn them on following the redirection from another page. It’s OK to see redirects unless they throw you to such a questionable place. At that point, enabling pop-up advertisements is served under the guise of the anti-bot check-up. Alternatively, the sites may deny showing you the content unless you enable these pop-up advertisements. These theses should already be the red flag, as sites commonly feature a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing this requirement should be the reason to leave the page doubtlessly. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not see the site – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up notifications.

Plotil push notification.

How does it work?

The vast majority of browsers support turning on push notifications from websites. Sites, on the other hand, can send out notifications with the content they like. It may be a promotion of the page listed for sale on this site, or a promotion of their partner page. As a result, you can see the push notification from site X, but interacting with it will direct you to site Y – because a referral link to that website was added.

Cyber burglars rely on this feature in their approach to earn money using illegal advertising. They trick victims into allowing the pop-ups, and after that just spread hundreds of promotions of other crooks they contract with. As you can suppose, no image-caring organisations will contract with fraudsters. All the Plotil popups you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. At some point, the same victim can be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming sites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The promotions these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a miserable commission for one viewer, but when you can send ads to hundreds of victims and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a much more significant sum. Despite most of such banners giving no result at all, it may still give all the parties a lot of money.

Are Plotil pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look safe – just a colourful pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you generally see in pop-up notifications. Plotil.com site is ruled by fraudsters, who deliberately throw hundreds of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any common sense and can make sporadic pop-up advertisements into a storm of ads. For weak computers, that may be enough to make the system slower. But troubles are not over at this point.

As any other thing that touches illegal ads, Plotil pop-up ads don’t have legit offers. Even when hackers make the ads similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the web page these ads 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 ads 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, Plotil pop-up advertisements are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Plotil pop-ups?

Fortunately, Plotil push notifications removal is not very complicated. They reside in the web browser and cannot hide themselves among system files. Nevertheless, as I told before, some pop-ups may introduce malware to your system. It is nearly impossible to show all of the cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a poor idea. For that reason, after removing the source of the pop-up notifications it is recommended to use anti-malware software. I’d especially recommend that if you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-ups, but they still appeared. That may be a sign of adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both system recovery and malware checkup purposes, thanks to its system recovery functionality and superb detection system.

First and foremost, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in manual or automated way. 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 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 Plotil 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 Plotil Pop-ups?

Name: Plotil

Description: Plotil - 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 Plotil.com push notifications?” or “why do Plotil.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Plotil 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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1. More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
2. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.