Rockblackstep pop-up notifications appear when you do not expect, disturbing and annoying you. However, they are much more than annoying pop-ups – their nature is surely malignant, and they may introduce other malware to your computer. In this article, I will guide you on how to remove Rockblackstep push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.
Any interaction with Rockblackstep pop-ups will be useless at best. At worst, the pages it can throw you to may introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups may also promote fake 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.
What are Rockblackstep pop-up advertisements?
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-ups and Rockblackstep notifications 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 fresh publications, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful thing to help your site to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested users to have the best deal.
Brief description of the Rockblackstep.com pop-ups:
Name | Rockblackstep.com |
Hosting | AS14061 DigitalOcean, LLC Netherlands, Amsterdam |
IP Address | 134.209.192.77 |
Malware type | Adware1 |
Effect | Unwanted pop-up advertisements |
Hazard level | Medium |
Malware source | Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites |
Similar behavior | Read, Inarilyhukel, Additionriddle |
Removal method | To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC |
Rockblackstep pop-up notifications, in contrast, are related to untrustworthy websites. You will commonly observe the offer to enable them after a redirection from another site. It’s OK to see redirects unless they throw you into such a dubious place. At that point, turning on push notifications is offered as the anti-bot filtering. In other cases, the websites can deny showing you the content unless you apply these pop-up ads. These requirements should be the red flag, as websites generally feature a different anti-bot mechanism. Spectating such an offer should be the reason to close the page 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 push notifications.
How does it work?
The majority of browsers support turning on pop-ups from sites. Sites, on the other hand, can send out notifications with the content of their choice. It can be a promotion of the product posted on this site, or a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you can see the push notification from site X, but interacting with it will throw you to site Y – because a link to the latter was embedded.
Scoundrels rely on this feature in their attempt to earn money through advertising. They trick users into turning on pop-ups, and after that just spread hundreds of promotions of other crooks they contract with. As you may suppose, no legit companies will contract with fraudsters. All the Rockblackstep notifications you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same victim can be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming web pages, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.
The promotions these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a negligible pay for one view, but when you have a huge number of victims and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a much more significant sum. Despite most of such banners giving no result at all, it may still give all the participants a lot of money.
Are Rockblackstep pop-up advertisements dangerous?
Yes, they are. At the surface, they may look safe – just a blinking window that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you generally see in pop-up advertisements. Rockblackstep.com web page is controlled by fraudsters, who intentionally show tons of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can make sporadic push notifications into a storm of ads. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all troubles these pop-up ads carry.
As any other thing that touches illegal advertising, Rockblackstep push notifications lack legit deals to offer. Even though crooks make the ads similar to ones from well-known retailers, the site 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 advertisements 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, Rockblackstep pop-up notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.
How to remove Rockblackstep pop-ups?
Fortunately, Rockblackstep pop-up ads removal is not very complicated. They sit in the browser and cannot hide themselves in the system. Nevertheless, as I told before, some pop-up notifications may introduce malicious programs to your system. It is hard to describe all of the cases, and manual malware removal is a bad idea. For that reason, after removing the source of the pop-ups it is recommended to use anti-malware software. I’d especially recommend that in the case when you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-ups, and they still appeared. That may be a sign of malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware removal purposes, because of its abilities of system recovery and multi-layer detection system.
First of all, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in manual or automated way. 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.
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 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 Rockblackstep 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 Rockblackstep Pop-ups?
Name: Rockblackstep
Description: Rockblackstep - 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 Rockblackstep.com push notifications?” or “why do Rockblackstep.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Rockblackstep 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.