Remove Powerpcfact Pop-up Virus — How to Remove?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Powerpcfact pop-up notifications appear when you do not expect, disturbing and irritating you. Nonetheless, that is much more than annoying pop-ups – their origins is clearly malignant, and they can bring other malicious stuff to your system. In this article, I will show you the guide how to remove Powerpcfact pop-up notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Powerpcfact pop-up advertisements will be ineffective at best. In worst case scenario, the websites it can open can introduce malware to your system. These push notifications may also promote fake online shopping websites which will take your money and payment info. The latter generally ends up with losing all the money you have on the exposed card.

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What are Powerpcfact pop-up notifications?

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 Powerpcfact notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Common pop-up ads are offered for you to enable with a straightforward purpose – notify you about the fresh articles, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful tool to help your website to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested ones to have the best price.

Short summary of the Powerpcfact.com pop-ups:
NamePowerpcfact.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address188.114.97.3
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorNancontrast, Overheatusa, Cdn
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Powerpcfact pop-up advertisements, as opposed, are related to unlegit websites. You will generally witness the offer to turn them on after a redirection from another website. It’s OK to see redirects unless they throw you to such a questionable place. In this case, enabling pop-up ads is served under the guise of the anti-DDoS check. Alternatively, the websites can deny showing you the contents unless you enable these pop-up advertisements. These demands should already raise suspicion, as sites generally feature a different anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing this offer should be the reason to close the site doubtlessly. Sometimes, even when you click “Allow”, you will not see the site – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the push notifications.

Powerpcfact push notification

Powerpcfact push notification.

How does this work?

The vast majority of browsers support turning on pop-ups from sites. Websites, on the other hand, can send out notifications with the content they like. It can be a promotion of the product or a page posted on this website, as well as a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you can see the pop-up from site X, but clicking it will direct you to site Y – because a link to that website was built in.

Cybercriminals rely on this ability in their approach to earn money through advertising. They trick users into turning on pop-ups, and then just spread numerous promotions of other crooks they have a deal with. As you may suppose, no image-caring organisations will contract with fraudsters. All the Powerpcfact notifications you may see lead to other fraudulent sites. In some cases, the same user can be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming websites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The promotions these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a negligible commission 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 way bigger sum. Despite most of such ads are ineffective, it may still bring all the parties a lot of money.

Are Powerpcfact pop-up ads dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they may look safe – just a blinking window that appears from time to time. However, the things this window promotes differ drastically from what you generally see in pop-ups. Powerpcfact.com web page is controlled by fraudsters, who intentionally throw tons of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any manners of advertising and can make sporadic pop-up ads into a storm of promotions. For weak computers, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all troubles these pop-ups carry.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing related to illegal ads, Powerpcfact push notifications lack legit offers. Even though hackers make the banners looking similar to ones from well-known retailers, 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 push notifications 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, Powerpcfact push notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Powerpcfact pop-ups?

Fortunately, Powerpcfact push notifications removal is not very complicated. They reside in the browser and can’t conceal themselves among system files. Nevertheless, as I told above, some push notifications may introduce malware to your system. It is hard to describe all cases, and manual malware removal is a poor idea. For that reason, after disabling the pop-ups it is recommended to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that if you have never clicked “Allow” to push notifications, but they still appeared. That may be a sign of adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both system recovery and malware removal purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and multi-layer detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that 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.

Tools tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

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.

Reset Browser Settings tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

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. 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 ensure that your browser will connect the right DNS while connecting to the web page 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 Powerpcfact 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.

GridinSoft Anti-Malware during the scan 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).

GridinSoft scan finished

How to Remove Powerpcfact Pop-ups?

Name: Powerpcfact

Description: Powerpcfact - 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 Powerpcfact.com push notifications?” or “why do Powerpcfact.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Powerpcfact 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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References

  1. More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
  2. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.

About the author

Wilbur Woodham

I was a technical writer from early in my career, and consider IT Security one of my foundational skills. I’m sharing my experience here, and I hope you find it useful.

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