Remove Puretheweb Pop-up Virus — How to Remove?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Puretheweb pop-up notifications may appear unexpectedly, covering the post of the site you visited or opening your browser when you don’t want it to be opened.

Clicking on the Puretheweb advertisement can result in the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the manual of Puretheweb popups clearing in several methods, as well as examining your computer for other malware existence.

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What are Puretheweb pop-ups?

Puretheweb popups are a consequence of adware action. Adware is a sort of malware that presents you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which creates a massive amount of revenue for adware suppliers. These ads might consist of explicit material, or have a web link to malevolent content/website, due to the fact that adware maintainers have no purpose to inspect the goodness of the web content they are going to show – their solitary target is cash.

Puretheweb push notification

Puretheweb push notification.

Pop-up promotions itself is a very good, low-priced and very efficient marketing solution1. It permits the vendor to attach the customers’ interest to their site, and the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they want to purchase. When the customer will get a pop-up notification that the TV set he desires to purchase is available at the online store he/she checked out earlier with a 15% price cut, one will certainly use this possibility and purchase it. Considering the incredibly low price for the popups and their targeting, such a promotion and marketing method is a favorite thing among the marketing teams of big internet retail stores.

Nevertheless, such a successful system could not be missed by malware developers. Ability to demonstrate the popup ads forcibly to the people of malware attack is an ideal basis for malicious manipulations with the popup ads. And Puretheweb.com ads is just one of hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a info for the Puretheweb
SitePuretheweb.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
Infection TypeAdware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address104.21.31.3
SymptomsAnnoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behaviorRingtgandmotiv, Sentativesathy, Iphonehub
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Puretheweb virus?

There are a huge amount of ways of getting contaminated by the adware that cause the Puretheweb popups tornado. A lion’s part of this computer virus instances is after the free software or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Freeware can also be downloaded from the main website, and the adware is supplied as a legit bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A huge amount of people frequently utilize the uncertain programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, different utilities that are free of cost, or even hacked programs. All of these types of applications are risky, because it is extremely simple to build in a Puretheweb 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.

Puretheweb popup virus may likewise be hidden in the promotion somewhere on the strange web page. Such websites are in most cases filled with intense and blinking advertisements, and their owners often approve any kind of promos to be published on their page. Therefore, clicking such banners is a shot in the dark: only the ad contractor knows what will occur when you press this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you may additionally get something far more threatening, like ransomware or coin miner; the substantial share of coin miners circulation is exactly after the malicious ads.

People dislike popups

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

Potentially unwanted applications, like Puretheweb pop-up virus can initiate a wide range of different problems on your PC. Distracting is not the only effect – pop-up notifications can present you the ads, where you are offered to get one more dubious application, or “a amazing anti-malware tool”. Scareware is often spread under the last slogun. Potentially unwanted applications, in turn, may have spyware functions. And it is pretty hard to distinguish the undesirable app from a normal one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and fake antiviruses, popup-related promotions are also chosen as a spreading way by different trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such malware is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you several hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not tapping these advertisements, 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 deal with it without information loss. It is recommended to wipe out the viruses with anti-malware applications as soon as possible.

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

The tutorial of Puretheweb adware clearing consists of 2 parts. Initially, we need to remove the malware, and then correct the results of its activity. The elimination task is really easy, since it may be performed even with making use of Microsoft Defender – anti-malware program that is present on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, because of its substantial resources consumption, as well as some problems that may be critical for some types of individuals, Defender is oftentimes turned off by the users, so its utilization is probably impossible. In addition, a variety of trojan viruses can disable the embedded antivirus. It is far better to make use of the separated program that will not have such weakness.

I’d suggest you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven anti-malware tool that will certainly erase the viruses from your personal computer and also make an impenetrable shield with a Proactive protection function. But let’s handle Puretheweb adware first.

Removing Puretheweb 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 Puretheweb 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 be connected the proper DNS while connecting to the website you want. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following text3:

# 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 things much more difficult to restore, specifically without the anti-malware software. Most of adware variants that are used to show you the Puretheweb pop-up promotions are modifying the deep browser setups, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to fix your browser settings after your machine was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will collapse soon. Sometimes, you will see no crash, however, large lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 seconds, and then it will be back to the normal, until you attempt to open settings once more.

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 Puretheweb Pop-ups?

Name: Puretheweb

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