Protocpz.xyz Pop-up Ads Removal — How to Fix Your Browser?

Protocpz.xyz pop-ups appear out of the blue, detracting and annoying you. However, that is way more than annoying pop-ups – their essence is cleanly malignant, and they can introduce other malicious stuff to your PC. In this post, I will show you how to remove Protocpz.xyz pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Protocpz.xyz pop-up advertisements will be ineffective at best. In worst case scenario, the sites it can show you may introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements can also advertise 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.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Protocpz.xyz 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 Protocpz.xyz pop-up advertisements?

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-up ads and Protocpz.xyz pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Common pop-up ads are offered for you to enable with a legitimate purpose – keep you aware about the new publications, goods for sale and so on. It is an effective approach to help your site to keep visitors and help the interested users to have the best deal.

Short summary of the Protocpz.xyz pop-ups:

Protocpz.xyz push notifications, in contrast, have a deal with untrustworthy sites. You will generally observe the proposition to enable them after a redirection from another page. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless they throw you into such a dubious place. At that point, turning on pop-up advertisements is offered under the guise of the anti-bot filtering. Alternatively, the websites can refuse to show you the contents unless you turn on these pop-ups. These demands should raise suspicion, as websites commonly have a different anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing such an offer is a reason to close the site doubtlessly. Sometimes, even when you click “Allow”, you will not see the web page – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up advertisements.

Protocpz.xyz push notification.

How does this work?

The majority of browsers support turning on pop-ups from websites. Sites, on the other hand, may send notifications with the content of their choice. It can be a promotion of the product posted on this website, as well as a promotion of their partner page. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but opening it will throw you to website Y – because a link to the latter was built in.

Scoundrels rely on this feature in their approach to earn money using illegal advertising. They trick victims into turning on pop-ups, and after that just spread numerous ads of anyone they have a deal with. As you may suppose, no benevolent companies will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Protocpz.xyz notifications you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same victim may get into a trap of multiple pop-up spamming web pages, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The ads these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It generally provides a negligible commission for one viewer, but when you have a huge number of victims and make it hundreds of times each day – that is a much bigger sum. Even though the majority of these banners are ineffective, it can still bring all the parties a lot of money.

Are Protocpz.xyz pop-up notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they may look harmless – just a colourful window that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you used to see in push notifications. Protocpz.xyz web page is controlled by fraudsters, who intentionally spread tons of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can make sporadic pop-up advertisements into a hurricane of promotions. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all troubles these pop-up advertisements carry.

As with any other thing that touches illegal ads, Protocpz.xyz push notifications don’t have legit deals to offer. Even though crooks make the banners looking similar to ones from well-known retailers, the web page 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 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, Protocpz.xyz pop-up ads are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Protocpz.xyz pop-ups?

Fortunately, Protocpz.xyz pop-up advertisements removal is not very complicated. They parasite in the web browser and cannot hide themselves on a disk. However, as I told above, some pop-up ads may introduce malicious programs to your system. It is nearly impossible to show all of the cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a poor idea. Therefore, after removing the source of the pop-up advertisements the best option is to use anti-malware software. I’d especially recommend that if you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up advertisements, but they still appeared. That can be a sign of malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware removal purposes, thanks to its system recovery functionality and multi-component detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to do 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.

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.

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. 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 ensure that your browser will connect the right DNS while connecting to the site you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following lines²:

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 Protocpz.xyz 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.

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).

How to Remove Protocpz.xyz Pop-ups?

Name: Protocpz.xyz

Description: Protocpz.xyz - 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 Protocpz.xyz push notifications?” or “why do Protocpz.xyz pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Protocpz.xyz 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 this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
2. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.