Remove Procaptchahub.top Pop-up Virus — How to Remove?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Procaptchahub.top push notifications appear out of the blue, detracting and irritating you. Nonetheless, they are slightly more than annoying notifications – their essence is surely malignant, and they can bring other malware to your computer. In this post, I will show you the guide how to remove Procaptchahub.top push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Procaptchahub.top pop-ups will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the websites it can throw you to can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up notifications can 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.

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What are Procaptchahub.top 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 Procaptchahub.top pop-ups is the malignant origins of the latter. Common pop-up notifications are offered for you to enable on different sites with a legitimate purpose – notify you about the new articles, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful thing to help your website to retain visitors and help the interested visitors to have the best deal.

Brief description of the Procaptchahub.top pop-ups:
NameProcaptchahub.top
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address104.21.12.251
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorNews, Thenatureart, Pioxu
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Procaptchahub.top push notifications, as opposed, have a deal with less legit websites. You will generally see the offer to enable them after a redirection from another website. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless it throws you to such a questionable place. At that point, turning on push notifications is offered under the guise of the anti-DDoS filtering. Alternatively, the sites can refuse to show you the content unless you turn on these pop-ups. These theses should be the red flag, as websites commonly feature a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Spectating such an requirement is a reason to leave the page doubtlessly. Sometimes, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the site – the sole page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-ups.

Procaptchahub.top push notification

Procaptchahub.top push notification.

How does this work?

The vast majority of web browsers support enabling push notifications from sites. Sites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content they want. It may be an advertisement of the product listed for sale on this particular website, or a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but opening it will direct you to site Y – because a referral link to the latter was embedded.

Crooks 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 numerous banners of other crooks they contract with. As you can suppose, no image-caring organisations will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Procaptchahub.top push ads you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same user may be trapped by several pop-up spamming websites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The promotions these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a miserable pay for one view, but when you have a huge number of users and make it hundreds of times each day – that is a much bigger sum. Even though most of these ads giving no result at all, it can still give all the parties a lot of profit.

Are Procaptchahub.top pop-up notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look harmless – just a colourful window that appears from time to time. However, the things this window promotes differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-up ads. Procaptchahub.top site is controlled by fraudsters, who intentionally spread hundreds and thousands of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any manners of advertising and can make sporadic push notifications into a storm of ads. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all problems these pop-ups carry.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing that touches illegal ads, Procaptchahub.top pop-up advertisements do not contain any legit deals to offer. Even though crooks make the ads looking similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the website 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 advertisements 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, Procaptchahub.top push notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Procaptchahub.top pop-ups?

Fortunately, Procaptchahub.top pop-up advertisements removal is not very complicated. They sit in the web browser and can’t conceal themselves in the system. Nonetheless, as I told above, some pop-up advertisements may promote malicious software to your computer. It is nearly impossible to predict all cases, and manual malware removal is a poor idea. Thus, after getting rid of the pop-ups the best option is to use anti-malware software. That is especially recommended if you have never allowed pop-up advertisements, and they still appeared. That may point at malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both 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.

Tools tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

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.

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 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 Procaptchahub.top 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 Procaptchahub.top Pop-ups?

Name: Procaptchahub.top

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