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

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Rougherin pop-up notifications appear when you do not expect, detracting and irritating you. Still, they are way more than annoying notifications – their origins is cleanly malignant, and they may install other malware to your PC. In this article, I will show you how to remove Rougherin pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Rougherin pop-up advertisements will be ineffective at best. At worst, the websites it can throw you to can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements may also promote 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 Rougherin 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-up ads and Rougherin notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Common pop-up advertisements are offered for you to enable on different sites with a understandable purpose – keep you aware about the latest posts, discounts and so on. It is a useful thing to help your website to keep visitors and help the interested visitors to have the best price.

Short summary of the Rougherinc.com pop-ups:
NameRougherinc.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address188.114.96.3
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorCupidconnect, Majormedialink, Superrroffers
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Rougherin pop-ups, as opposed, have a deal with less legit web pages. You will commonly see the proposition to turn them on after a redirection from another page. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless they throw you to such a questionable place. In this case, turning on pop-up advertisements is served as the anti-bot check. Alternatively, the web pages can deny showing you the content unless you enable these pop-up notifications. These demands should raise suspicion, as websites generally have a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing such an requirement is a reason to leave the site right away. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not see the site – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the push notifications.

Rougherin push notification

Rougherin push notification.

How does it work?

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

Cyber burglars rely on this ability in their approach to earn money through advertising. They trick users into turning on pop-ups, and after that just spread hundreds of banners of other crooks they have a deal with. As you may suppose, no image-caring organisations will contract with fraudsters. All the Rougherin notifications you may see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same victim may get into a trap of several pop-up spamming sites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It generally provides a miserable payment for one viewer, but when you can send ads to a huge number of users and make it hundreds of times each day – that is a way bigger sum. Despite most of these banners giving no result at all, it may still give all the participants a lot of profit.

Are Rougherin push notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look non-threatening – just a blinking window that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the things this window promotes differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-up advertisements. Rougherinc.com site is controlled by fraudsters, who intentionally throw hundreds and thousands of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any common sense and can launch sporadic pop-up advertisements into a hurricane of promotions. For weak computers, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all problems these pop-up advertisements carry.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing that touches illegal advertising, Rougherin pop-up advertisements lack legit offers. Even though crooks make the banners looking similar to ones from well-known retailers, the web page these ads 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 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, Rougherin 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 Rougherin pop-ups?

Fortunately, Rougherin push notifications removal is not very complicated. They sit in the web browser and cannot conceal themselves on a disk. Nevertheless, as I told above, some pop-up ads can promote malicious programs to your system. It is nearly impossible to describe all of the cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a bad idea. Therefore, after getting rid of the push notifications it is recommended to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended in the case when you have never allowed pop-up notifications, and they still appeared. That can be a sign of malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware removal purposes, because of its abilities of system recovery and advanced detection system.

Initially, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in manual or automated way. 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.

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 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 Rougherin 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 Rougherin Pop-ups?

Name: Rougherin

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