Pushkacentr pop-up notifications appear when you do not expect, disturbing and irritating you. Still, they are way more than just notifications – their origins is cleanly malicious, and they may install other malware to your computer. In this article, I will show you how to remove Pushkacentr pop-up notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.
Any interaction with Pushkacentr pop-up advertisements will be useless at best. At worst, the sites it can throw you to may introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups may also advertise fake shopping sites which will take your money and payment info. The latter generally ends up with losing all the money you have on the exposed card.
What are Pushkacentr pop-up notifications?
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 push notifications and Pushkacentr pop-ups is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal pop-up advertisements are offered for you to enable on different sites with a straightforward purpose – notify you about the new posts, goods for sale and so on. It is an effective approach to help your website to keep visitors and help the interested visitors to have the best price.
Short summary of the Pushkacentr.com pop-up ads:
Name | Pushkacentr.com |
Hosting | AS39572 DataWeb Global Group B.V. Netherlands, Amsterdam |
IP Address | 88.208.46.27 |
Malware type | Adware1 |
Effect | Unwanted pop-up advertisements |
Hazard level | Medium |
Malware source | Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites |
Similar behavior | Ponredon, News, Tpbstnws |
Removal method | To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC |
Pushkacentr push notifications, in contrast, are related to untrustworthy websites. You will generally observe the proposition to turn them on after a redirection from another website. Redirects are OK unless it throws you to such a questionable place. In this case, enabling pop-up ads is offered under the guise of the anti-bot check. Alternatively, the sites can deny showing you the content unless you turn on these pop-up advertisements. These requirements should be the red flag, as websites generally have a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Spectating such an demand is a reason to leave the site doubtlessly. Sometimes, even when you click “Allow”, you will not get to the site – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-ups.
How does it work?
The majority of web browsers support enabling pop-ups from sites. Sites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content they like. It may be a promotion of the product listed for sale on this particular website, or a promotion of their partner page. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but interacting with it will throw you to site Y – because a link to the latter was added.
Cybercriminals rely on this ability in their attempt to earn money through advertising. They trick users into allowing them to show the banners, and then just spread hundreds of ads of anyone they have a deal with. As you can suppose, no normal companies will contract with fraudsters. All the Pushkacentr notifications you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same victim can be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming websites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.
The banners these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a negligible payment for one view, but when you can send ads to a huge number of victims and make it hundreds of times every day – that is a much more significant sum. Despite the majority of such ads giving no result at all, it can still bring all the participants a lot of profit.
Are Pushkacentr pop-ups dangerous?
Yes, they are. Initially, they may look non-threatening – just a blinking window that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you generally see in pop-up notifications. Pushkacentr.com website is controlled by fraudsters, who intentionally spread hundreds and thousands of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can make sporadic pop-ups into a hurricane of banners. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all problems these pop-up ads carry.
As any other thing that touches illegal ads, Pushkacentr pop-up advertisements lack legit offers. Even when crooks make the ads looking similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the web page 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 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, Pushkacentr pop-ups are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.
How to remove Pushkacentr pop-ups?
Fortunately, Pushkacentr pop-up advertisements removal is not very complicated. They parasite in the web browser and cannot conceal themselves on a disk. However, as I pointed out above, some pop-up advertisements can introduce malware to your system. It is nearly impossible to show all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a poor idea. Thus, after removing the source of the push notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended in the case when you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up ads, but they still appeared. This situation may point at adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware removal purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and superb detection system.
First of all, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that 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 can 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:
- Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option:
- 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:
- Open Menu tab (three strips in upper right corner) and click the “Help” button. In the appeared menu choose “troubleshooting information”:
- In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:
After choosing this option, you will see the next message:
If you use Google Chrome
- Open Settings tab, find the “Advanced” button. In the extended tab choose the “Reset and clean up” button:
- In the appeared list, click on the “Restore settings to their original defaults”:
- 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
- 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:
- 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 web page 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 Pushkacentr 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 Pushkacentr Pop-ups?
Name: Pushkacentr
Description: Pushkacentr - 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 Pushkacentr.com push notifications?” or “why do Pushkacentr.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Pushkacentr 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
User Review
( votes)References
- More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
- Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.