Remove Psoufauh Virus — How to Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Psoufauh pop-up notifications may appear out of the blue, covering the content of the website you went to or opening your browser when you do not desire it to be opened.

Clicking the Psoufauh ad may cause the injection of other malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the guide of Psoufauh popups removal in a couple of methods, as well as inspecting your system for extra malware existence.

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What are Psoufauh pop-ups?

Psoufauh popups are a consequence of adware activity. Adware is a kind of malware that shows you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which produces a substantial amount of earnings for adware representatives. These advertisements may have sometimes shocking information, or have a link to harmful content/website, considering that adware maintainers have no purpose to inspect the goodness of the web content they are going to show – their single target is cash.

Psoufauh push notification

Psoufauh push notification.

Pop-up advertising itself is a good, affordable and very efficient advertising instrument1. It makes it possible for the vendor to attach the buyers’ attention to their site, as well as the customers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they intend to buy. When the consumer will get a pop-up notification that the TV set he likes to buy is available at the online store he/she saw previously with a 15% discount, one will undoubtedly use this possibility and get it. Considering the extremely low cost for the popups and their targeting, such a marketing tool is a much-loved thing amongst the advertising teams of big online retailers.

Nevertheless, such a profitable scheme could not be missed by malware creators. Potential to show the popup ads forcibly to the targets of malware attack is a perfect basis for malevolent manipulations with the popup promotions. And Psoufauh.com advertisements is just one of hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a info for the Psoufauh site
Site Psoufauh.com
Hosting AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 172.67.154.213
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior Winconcos, Greatcaptchahere, Vipcapchanow
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Psoufauh virus?

There are a huge amount of methods of becoming contaminated by the adware that cause the Psoufauh popups tornado. A lion’s part of this malware cases is after the free software or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Free software can also be downloaded from the main website, and the adware is provided as a legitimate bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A huge amount of people oftentimes work with the dubious programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, various utilities that are free of cost, and even hacked programs. Every one of these sorts of software are risky, since it is quite easy to integrate a Psoufauh malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

Psoufauh popup virus may likewise be hidden in the promotion somewhere on the odd site. Such web pages are usually full of colorful and blinking ads, and their owners generally accept any promotions to be published on their web page. Therefore, clicking on such banners is a shot in the dark: only the ad provider realizes what will occur when you press this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you may additionally get something much more dangerous, like ransomware or coin miner; the large share of coin miners circulation is exactly after the malicious promotions.

People dislike popups

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

Potentially undesirable applications, like Psoufauh pop-up virus can provoke a wide range of problems on your PC. Distracting is not the single problem – pop-up notifications can show you the promotions, where you are offered to download one more unknown program, or “a perfect anti-malware tool”. Scareware is usually distributed with the use of the last motto. Potentially undesirable applications, in turn, can have spyware functions. And it is quite hard to distinguish the undesirable app from a good one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related ads are also chosen as a distribution way by various trojan viruses, for example – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such malware is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not interacting with these ads, they may be clicked by whoever who also makes use of your personal computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without data and money loss. It is recommended to remove the viruses with antivirus programs as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Psoufauh pop-up advertisements?

The guide of Psoufauh adware clearing includes 2 parts. First, we need to get rid of the malware, and afterwards deal with the consequences of its action. The removal task is really simple, due to the fact that it can be performed even with using Microsoft Defender – anti-malware program that is present on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, because of its substantial resources usage, as well as some defects that may be pivotal for some groups of individuals, Defender is oftentimes disabled by the users, so its usage is likely impossible. Additionally, various trojan viruses are able to turn off the embedded antivirus. It is much better to use the separated program that will not have such weakness.

I would certainly suggest you to use Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven security device that will certainly wipe out the malware from your personal computer and also make an impenetrable shield with a Proactive protection feature. However, let’s take care of Psoufauh adware initially.

Removing Psoufauh 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 Psoufauh 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 browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your web browser will definitely connect the proper DNS while connecting to the web page you want. Create a text file named “hosts” on your desktop, after that 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 more difficult to repair, specifically without the anti-malware program. Most of adware variants that are used to show you the Psoufauh pop-up advertisements are altering the deep browser setups, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to fix your browser settings after your computer was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will collapse soon. Sometimes, you will see no crash, however, large lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 seconds, and afterwards it will be back to the typical, up until you try to open settings again.

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 Psoufauh Pop-ups?

Name: Psoufauh

Description: Psoufauh - 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 Psoufauh.com push notifications?” or “why do Psoufauh.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Psoufauh 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 advertisements on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware review and also the reasons why I recommend it for malware removal.
  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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