Ptoothooshee Notification Removal — How to Fix Your Browser

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Ptoothooshee pop-up notifications appear out of the blue, bothering and annoying you. Still, that is much more than annoying pop-ups – their essence is surely malicious, and they can introduce other malware to your device. In this article, I will guide you on how to remove Ptoothooshee push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Ptoothooshee pop-ups will be ineffective at best. At worst, the websites it can throw you to can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up notifications can 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 Ptoothooshee 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 pop-up notifications and Ptoothooshee notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Common pop-up ads are offered for you to enable on different sites with a legitimate purpose – notify you about the latest publications, goods for sale and so on. It is an effective approach to help your site to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested users to have the best price.

Brief summary of the Ptoothooshee.com pop-up ads:
NamePtoothooshee.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address172.64.100.25
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorGomend, Necktootext, Dariol
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Ptoothooshee pop-up notifications, in contrast, are related to less legit websites. You will commonly observe the offer to turn them on after a redirection from another page. Redirects are OK unless they throw you to such a dubious place. At that point, turning on pop-ups is served as the anti-bot check-up. In other cases, the web pages may refuse to show you the content unless you enable these pop-up notifications. These demands should raise suspicion, as websites commonly have a different anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing such an offer should be the reason to close the site doubtlessly. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not get to the site – the sole page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up advertisements.

Ptoothooshee push notification

Ptoothooshee push notification.

How does it work?

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

Crooks rely on this feature in their approach to gain money using illegal advertising. They trick users into allowing them to show the banners, and after that just spread numerous banners of anyone they contract with. As you can suppose, no benevolent companies will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Ptoothooshee push ads you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. At some point, the same victim can be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming sites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The promotions these rascals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a miserable pay for one viewer, but when you have hundreds of users and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a way bigger sum. Even though the majority of such banners are ineffective, it can still bring all the parties a lot of profit.

Are Ptoothooshee pop-up notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they may look non-threatening – just a blinking pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-up ads. Ptoothooshee.com web page is controlled by crooks, who intendedly spread tons of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can make sporadic pop-up advertisements into a hurricane of banners. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all troubles these pop-up ads carry.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing related to illegal ads, Ptoothooshee pop-up notifications do not contain any legit deals to offer. Even when crooks make the banners similar to ones from well-known retailers, the website these banners will throw you to are completely different. And these pages may 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 ads 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, Ptoothooshee push notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Ptoothooshee pop-ups?

Fortunately, Ptoothooshee pop-up ads removal is pretty easy. They parasite in the browser and can’t hide themselves in the system. Nonetheless, as I stated above, some pop-up notifications can introduce malware to your computer. It is hard to show all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is inconvenient. For that reason, after getting rid of the pop-up ads the best option is to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that in the case when you have never allowed pop-up ads, but they still appeared. That can be a sign of malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware scanning purposes, because of its abilities of system recovery and advanced detection system.

Initially, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in both manual and automatic manner. The former, obviously, takes 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 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 Ptoothooshee 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 Ptoothooshee Pop-ups?

Name: Ptoothooshee

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