Remove Positivestar.org Pop-up Virus — How to Remove?

Positivestar.org pop-up notifications can show up out of the blue, covering the post of the website you explored or opening your browser when you do not wish it to be opened.

Clicking the Positivestar.org promotion can cause the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the manual of Positivestar.org popups removal in a couple of ways, as well as examining your PC for additional malware existence.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Positivestar.org 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 Positivestar.org pop-ups?

Positivestar.org popups are a result of adware presence. Adware is a type of malware that demonstrates to you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click advertisements, which creates a large amount of revenue for adware distributors. These ads may contain sometimes shocking composition, or have a link to harmful content/website, due to the fact that adware maintainers have no purpose to examine the goodness of the material they are going to reveal – their solitary target is money.

Positivestar.org push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is a good, low-cost and also extremely successful marketing solution¹. It permits the seller to attach the customers’ interest to their site, and the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they wish to purchase. When the person will receive a pop-up notification that the TV set he desires to purchase is available at the online shop he/she saw previously with a 15% price cut, one will surely use this possibility and purchase it. Taking into consideration the incredibly low cost for the popups and their targeting, such a marketing method is a favorite thing among the advertising departments of huge online retailers.

Nonetheless, such a rewarding strategy could not be missed by malware developers. Potential to demonstrate the popup ads by force to the victims of malware invasion is an ideal basis for malicious tricks with the popup promotions. And Positivestar.org promotions is just one of hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a short info for the Positivestar.org site

How have I got the Positivestar.org virus?

There are a lot of methods of becoming infected by the adware that lead to the Positivestar.org popups storm. A lion’s part of this virus incidents is after the free software or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Free software may also be downloaded from the official website, and the adware is provided as a legitimate bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A plenty of users often work with the uncertain programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, a wide range of utilities that are free, or perhaps hacked programs. All of these kinds of software are dangerous, because it is quite easy to integrate a Positivestar.org malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Positivestar.org popup malware may also be hidden in the promotion somewhere on the unusual website. Such sites are typically filled with intense and blinking ads, and their owners usually approve any kind of promotions to be published on their page. Hence, clicking such banners is a shot in the dark: only the ad contractor realizes what will happen when you press this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you may also get something much more hazardous, like ransomware or coin miner; the substantial share of coin miners distribution is exactly after the malicious ads.

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

Potentially unwanted programs, like Positivestar.org pop-up virus may initiate a lot of different troubles on your computer. Distracting is not the single problem – pop-up notifications may display you the advertisements, where you are offered to download one more unknown application, or “a amazing security tool”. Scareware is usually distributed with the last slogun. Potentially undesirable applications, in turn, may have spyware functions. And it is pretty hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a normal one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and fake antiviruses, popup-related banners are also chosen as a distribution method by different trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such viruses is 100% unwanted, and can cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And even if you are not interacting with these advertisements, they can be clicked by someone who also makes use of your PC – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without information loss. It is recommended to get rid of the viruses with anti-malware applications as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Positivestar.org pop-up advertisements?

The tutorial of Positivestar.org adware clearing includes 2 parts. First, we need to get rid of the malware, and afterwards fix the results of its activity. The elimination procedure is quite easy, since it may be done even with the use of Microsoft Defender – anti-malware program that is available on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nonetheless, as a result of its substantial resources usage, as well as some defects that may be pivotal for some categories of individuals, Defender is oftentimes turned off by the users, so its use is probably impossible. What’s more, a wide range of trojan viruses can disable the embedded antivirus. It is much better to make use of the separated program that will not have such weakness.

I’d recommend you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware² – a well-proven antivirus device that will definitely erase the viruses from your personal computer and also create an invulnerable cover with a Proactive protection feature. But let’s manage Positivestar.org adware initially.

Removing Positivestar.org popup virus with GridinSoft Anti-Malware

• Download and install GridinSoft Anti-Malware. After the installation, you will be offered to perform the Standard Scan. Approve this action.

• 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.

• When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Positivestar.org malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.

Now, when the computer is clean of viruses, we can proceed to the browser reset. You can do this step manually, as well as with the use of GridinSoft Anti-Malware.

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. 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 make sure that your web browser will definitely be connected the appropriate DNS while connecting to the web page you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your computer’s desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following text³:

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.

Nonetheless, there is one trouble that makes the things a lot harder to fix, specifically without the anti-malware program. The majority of adware versions that are used to show you the Positivestar.org pop-up promotions are altering the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to fix your browser settings after your system was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will collapse soon. In certain cases, you will see no crash, however, significant lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 seconds, and after that it will be back to the normal, till you attempt to open settings once more.

Reset your browser settings 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 the options for each browser. By default, they are set up in the manner which 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 last is also able to reset the HOSTS file without any additional commands.

How to Remove Positivestar.org Pop-ups?

Name: Positivestar.org

Description: Positivestar.org - 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 Positivestar.org push notifications?” or “why do Positivestar.org pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Positivestar.org 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 pop-up ads on Wikipedia.
2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware overview and also the reasons why I advise it for malware elimination.
3. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.