Positive-News Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Positive-News pop-up notifications can appear unexpectedly, covering the subject of the site you went to or opening your browser when you don’t wish it to be opened.

Clicking the Positive-News promotion may trigger the injection of other malware or unwanted programs. In this post, you will see the manual of Positive-News popups removal in various manners, as well as examining your computer for other viruses existence.

What are Positive-News pop-ups?

Positive-News popups are an outcome of adware presence. Adware is a sort of malware that suggests you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click advertisements, which produces a significant volume of profit for adware distributors. These advertisements may include explicit composition, or have a link to malicious content/website, considering that adware maintainers have no purpose to examine the goodness of the content they are going to reveal – their single target is money.

Positive-News push notification

Positive-News push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is a good, cheap and also really successful marketing instrument1. It makes it possible for the seller to link the customers’ attention to their website, as well as the buyers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they want to purchase. When the customer will get a pop-up alert that the TV set he wishes to buy is available at the online shop he/she saw earlier with a 15% price cut, one will undoubtedly use this possibility and get it. Taking into consideration the incredibly small cost for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising instrument is a favourite thing amongst the advertising teams of big internet sellers.

Nonetheless, such a profitable strategy could not be missed by malware creators. Potential to demonstrate the popup advertisements by force to the people of malware attack is a perfect basis for malevolent adjustments with the popup promotions. And Positive-news.org ads is one of hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a short info for the Positive-News site
Site Positive-news.org
Hosting AS14618 Amazon.com, Inc.
United States, Ashburn
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 34.193.82.36
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior News, Stheiweeki, Birthdiscipline
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Positive-News virus?

There are a huge amount of ways of becoming contaminated by the adware that trigger the Positive-News popups tornado. A lion’s part of this computer virus instances is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Freeware may additionally be downloaded from the main site, and the adware is provided as a legit bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A lot of individuals frequently utilize the uncertain programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, various apps that are free, or even hacked programs. All of these types of software are unsafe, due to the fact that it is very simple to integrate a Positive-News malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

People dislike popups

The statistic shows that people dislike popup advertising more than other types of promotions

How can I get rid of Positive-News pop-up advertisements?

The tutorial of Positive-News adware clearing includes 2 sections. Initially, we need to eliminate the malware, and after that take care of the consequences of its action. The removal procedure is really simple, since it can be performed even with the use of Microsoft Defender – security software that is available on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, because of its large resources consumption, as well as some failures that may be serious for some categories of users, Defender is oftentimes turned off by the users, so its utilization is most likely impossible. What’s more, a wide range of trojan viruses are capable to shut off the embedded antivirus. It is far better to use the separated program that will not have such exposures.

    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 Positive-News malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware - After Cleaning

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 make sure that your browser will connect the proper DNS while connecting to the site you want. Create 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 much more difficult to restore, particularly without the anti-malware software. The majority of adware variations that are utilized to show you the Positive-News pop-up promotions are altering the deep browser setups, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to change your browser settings after your PC was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will collapse quickly. Sometimes, you will see no crash, however, huge 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 try to open settings once more.

References

  1. More about pop-up advertisements on Wikipedia.
  2. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.

About the author

Wilbur Woodham

Technical writer covering malware detections, unwanted programs, and browser-based threats. Wilbur turns research notes into step-by-step guides that Windows users can follow safely.

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