Rocklightstep Pop-up Virus — How to Remove Unwanted Ads?

Rocklightstep pop-ups appear when you do not expect, distracting and annoying you. Still, they are much more than annoying notifications – their origins is clearly malicious, and they can introduce other malicious stuff to your computer. In this post, I will show you the guide how to remove Rocklightstep push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Rocklightstep pop-up notifications will be ineffective at best. At worst, the sites it can open can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements 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.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Rocklightstep manually may take hours and may damage your PC in the process. I recommend you to download GridinSoft Anti-Malware for threats removal. Allows to complete scan and cure your PC during the trial period.

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What are Rocklightstep 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 push notifications and Rocklightstep notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal pop-up advertisements are offered for you to enable on different sites with a understandable purpose – notify you about the latest articles, discounts and so on. It is an effective approach to help your website to keep visitors and help the interested ones to have the best deal.

Short summary of the Rocklightstep.com pop-ups:

Rocklightstep pop-up notifications, in contrast, are related to unlegit sites. You will commonly observe the offer to enable them following the redirection from another page. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless it throws you to such a questionable place. At that point, enabling pop-ups is served under the guise of the anti-bot check-up. In other cases, the web pages may refuse to show you the content unless you enable these push notifications. These demands should raise suspicion, as sites usually feature a different anti-bot mechanism. Spectating this demand 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 pop-up advertisements.

Rocklightstep push notification.

How does this work?

The vast majority of web browsers support enabling push notifications from sites. Sites, on the other hand, can send out notifications with the content they want. It can be an advertisement of the page listed on this particular website, or an ad of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but interacting with it will redirect you to website Y – because a referral link to that website was embedded.

Cyber burglars rely on this feature in their attempt to earn money using illegal advertising. They trick victims into turning on pop-ups, and then just spread hundreds of ads of anyone they contract with. As you can suppose, no legit organisations will have a business with fraudsters. All the Rocklightstep popups you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same user can get into a trap of multiple pop-up spamming web pages, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The ads these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a negligible pay for one view, but when you can send ads to hundreds of users and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a much more significant sum. Even though most of such ads are ineffective, it may still give all the parties a lot of profit.

Are Rocklightstep pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look harmless – just a colourful window that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you used to see in pop-up notifications. Rocklightstep.com web page is controlled by crooks, who intentionally show hundreds and thousands of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never 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 problems these pop-ups carry.

As any other thing that touches illegal ads, Rocklightstep pop-up notifications do not contain any legit deals to offer. Even though hackers make the banners similar to ones from well-known retailers, the site 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 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, Rocklightstep 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 Rocklightstep pop-ups?

Fortunately, Rocklightstep pop-up advertisements removal is not very complicated. They parasite in the browser and can’t hide themselves in the system. Nevertheless, as I told above, some push notifications can deliver malware to your computer. It is hard to show all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a bad idea. For that reason, after removing the source of the push notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. That is especially recommended if you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up advertisements, but they still appeared. This situation may be a sign of adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both system recovery and malware scanning and removal purposes, thanks to its system recovery functionality and advanced detection system.

First and foremost, 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 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 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.

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. 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. In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:

After choosing this option, you will see the next message:

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:

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 Rocklightstep 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 Rocklightstep Pop-ups?

Name: Rocklightstep

Description: Rocklightstep - 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 Rocklightstep.com push notifications?” or “why do Rocklightstep.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Rocklightstep 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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1. More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
2. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.