Refsignfog.live Ads Removal Guide — Fix Push Notification

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Refsignfog.live pop-up notifications appear when you do not expect, disturbing and irritating you. Nonetheless, that is slightly more than simple pop-up ads – their nature is clearly malicious, and they may install other malware to your device. In this post, I will guide you on how to remove Refsignfog.live pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Refsignfog.live pop-ups will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the websites it can throw you to can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements 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.

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What are Refsignfog.live 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 pop-up ads and Refsignfog.live pop-ups is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal pop-up ads are offered for you to enable with a straightforward purpose – notify you about the latest publications, discounts and so on. It is an effective approach to help your website to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested users to have the best deal.

Brief summary of the Refsignfog.live pop-up ads:
NameRefsignfog.live
HostingAS24940 Hetzner Online GmbH
Germany, Gunzenhausen
IP Address167.235.71.165
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorNews, Wingbenmass, News
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Refsignfog.live push notifications, on the other hand, are related to unlegit websites. You will commonly see the offer to turn them on following the redirection from another website. Redirects are OK unless it throws you to such a questionable place. At that point, enabling push notifications is offered as the anti-DDoS check-up. Alternatively, the web pages may refuse to show you the content unless you apply these pop-up notifications. These requirements should raise suspicion, as websites generally have a different anti-bot mechanism. Seeing such an demand should be the reason to skip the website right away. Sometimes, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not get to the web page – the sole page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up ads.

Refsignfog.live push notification

Refsignfog.live push notification.

How does this work?

The vast majority of browsers support enabling pop-ups from websites. Websites, on the other hand, may send notifications with the content they want. It can be a promotion of the product or a page listed on this site, or a promotion of their partner page. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but clicking it will redirect you to website Y – because a referral link to the latter was added.

Cybercriminals bear on this feature in their attempt to gain money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing them to show the banners, and then just spread numerous promotions of anyone they have a deal with. As you can suppose, no benevolent companies will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Refsignfog.live push ads you may see lead to other fraudulent sites. In some cases, the same victim may be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming sites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The promotions these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It generally provides a miserable payment for one view, but when you have hundreds 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 give all the parties a lot of profit.

Are Refsignfog.live push notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they may look harmless – just a colourful 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 push notifications. Refsignfog.live website is ruled by fraudsters, who intentionally show tons of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any common sense and can launch sporadic pop-up ads into a storm of promotions. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But problems are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing that touches illegal advertising, Refsignfog.live pop-up notifications do not contain any legit offers. Even though crooks make the ads looking similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the web page these banners 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 push 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, Refsignfog.live 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 Refsignfog.live pop-ups?

Fortunately, Refsignfog.live pop-up advertisements removal is pretty easy. They reside in the web browser and can’t conceal themselves on a disk. However, as I told before, some pop-ups may deliver malware to your system. It is nearly impossible to show all of the cases, and manual malware removal is a bad idea. Thus, after disabling the pop-up advertisements it is recommended to use anti-malware software. That is especially recommended if you have never allowed pop-up notifications, and they still appeared. This situation may be a sign of malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both system recovery and malware checkup purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and multi-component 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.

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 site 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 Refsignfog.live 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 Refsignfog.live Pop-ups?

Name: Refsignfog.live

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