Remove Profitablegate.com Pop-up Ads — How to Fix Gude

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Profitablegate.com pop-up alerts may appear out of the blue, covering the content of the site you checked or opening your web browser when you do not need it to be opened.

Clicking the Profitablegate.com ad can cause the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this post, you will see the manual of Profitablegate.com popups clearing in various ways, as well as inspecting your PC for additional malware existence.

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What are Profitablegate.com pop-ups?

Profitablegate.com popups are an outcome of adware presence. Adware is a type of malware that demonstrates to you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which produces a large volume of revenue for adware distributors. These promotions may contain sometimes shocking material, or have a link to malicious content/website, since adware maintainers have no reason to inspect the goodness of the web content they are going to reveal – their single target is money.

Profitablegate.com push notification

Profitablegate.com push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is a good, low-priced and very productive marketing solution1. It allows the vendor to attach the buyers’ attention 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 likes to purchase is provided at the online store he/she saw previously with a 15% price cut, one will undoubtedly use this chance and buy it. Considering the very low price for the popups and their targeting, such a promotion and marketing method is a favourite thing among the marketing departments of large online retail stores.

However, such a successful system could not be missed by malware developers. Ability to show the popup advertisements forcibly to the people of malware invasion is an ideal basis for malicious tricks with the popup promotions. And Profitablegate.com advertisements is one of hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a short details for the Profitablegate.com site
SiteProfitablegate.com
HostingAS39572 DataWeb Global Group B.V.
United States, Washington
Infection TypeAdware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address192.243.59.20
SymptomsAnnoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behaviorDlxrlc2ni2, Onlinenews2day, Ahwrin88tl
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Profitablegate.com virus?

There are a lot of ways of getting infected by the adware that lead to the Profitablegate.com popups tornado. A lion’s part of this virus incidents is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Freeware can additionally be downloaded from the official site, and the adware is delivered as a legitimate bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A number of individuals regularly utilize the dubious programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, a wide range of tools that are free, or perhaps hacked programs. Every one of these kinds of applications are dangerous, because it is quite simple to include a Profitablegate.com malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Profitablegate.com popup malware may likewise be concealed in the advertisement somewhere on the strange site. Such websites are typically filled with colorful and blinking advertisements, and their owners usually permit any kind of promotions to be published on their web page. Therefore, clicking such banners is a shot in the dark: only the advertisement provider knows what will happen when you press this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you may additionally receive something far more risky, like ransomware or coin miner; the big share of coin miners circulation is exactly after the malicious advertisements.

People dislike popups

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

Potentially undesirable applications, like Profitablegate.com pop-up virus may cause a wide range of different troubles on your personal computer. Distracting is not the only problem – pop-ups may present you the advertisements, where you are offered to download one more strange application, or “a perfect anti-malware tool”. Scareware is usually distributed under the last slogun. Potentially unwanted applications, in turn, may have spyware functionality. And it is pretty hard to distinguish the undesirable app from a good one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related banners are also exploited as a distribution way by various trojan viruses, for example – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such viruses is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And even if you are not interacting with these banners, they can be clicked by someone who also makes use of your computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the things may become much more serious, and it will be much harder to deal with it without information loss. It is recommended to remove the viruses with antivirus applications as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Profitablegate.com pop-up advertisements?

The manual of Profitablegate.com adware removal consists of 2 parts. First, we need to deal with the malware, and then fix the results of its action. The removal task is quite easy, due to the fact that it may be executed even with making use of Microsoft Defender – anti-virus software that is present on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. However, as a result of its significant resources usage, as well as some failures that may be crucial for some categories of individuals, Defender is often disabled by the users, so its utilization is likely impossible. Additionally, a variety of trojan viruses are capable to disable the embedded antivirus. It is much better to make use of the separated program that will not have such vulnerabilities.

I would certainly recommend you to use Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven security tool that will definitely eliminate the malware from your system and create an invulnerable cover with a Proactive protection function. However, let’s deal with Profitablegate.com adware initially.

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

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. 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 web browsers are reset, you need to make sure that your browser will definitely be connected the proper DNS while connecting to the site you want. Create a text file named “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then 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.

Nonetheless, there is one problem that makes the things much harder to restore, specifically without the anti-malware software. The majority of adware variants that are utilized to show you the Profitablegate.com pop-up promotions are modifying the deep browser settings, 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. Sometimes, you will see no crash, but large lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 secs, and after that it will be back to the typical, until you try to open settings one more time.

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.

Tools tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

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.

Reset Browser Settings tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

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 Profitablegate.com Pop-ups?

Name: Profitablegate.com

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