ruFixeAdv Notification Removal — How to Fix Your Browser

Written by Wilbur Woodham
ruFixeAdv push notifications appear when you do not expect, bothering and annoying you. However, they are way more than simple pop-up ads – their origins is cleanly malicious, and they may install other malicious stuff to your computer. In this post, I will guide you on how to remove ruFixeAdv pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with ruFixeAdv pop-up notifications will be ineffective at best. In worst case scenario, the web pages it can show you may introduce malware to your system. These push notifications may also advertise fake online 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 ruFixeAdv 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 ruFixeAdv notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal push notifications are offered for you to enable with a understandable purpose – notify you about the fresh publications, discounts and so on. It is an effective approach to help your site to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested ones to have the best deal.

Short summary of the Rufixeadv.com pop-ups:
NameRufixeadv.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address188.114.97.3
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorNews, News, Entoftheusysian
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

ruFixeAdv pop-ups, in contrast, are related to unlegit websites. You will generally observe the offer to enable them after a redirection from another site. It’s OK to see redirects unless they throw you to such a questionable place. At that point, turning on pop-up notifications is served under the guise of the anti-bot check-up. Alternatively, the sites may refuse to show you the content unless you apply these pop-up notifications. These theses should already be the red flag, as sites generally feature a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Seeing this demand is a reason to leave the page doubtlessly. Sometimes, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the site – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up ads.

ruFixeAdv push notification

ruFixeAdv push notification.

How does this work?

The majority of web browsers support turning on push notifications 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 website, or an ad of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but clicking it will direct you to site Y – because a referral link to that website was built in.

Cybercriminals bear on this feature in their attempt to earn money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing them to show the banners, and after that just spread numerous banners of anyone they contract with. As you may suppose, no image-caring companies will have a deal with fraudsters. All the ruFixeAdv push ads you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same user may be trapped by several pop-up spamming web pages, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a negligible payment for one viewer, but when you can send ads to a huge number of users and show them hundreds of ads every day – that is a much bigger sum. Despite the majority of these banners giving no result at all, it may still bring all the participants a lot of money.

Are ruFixeAdv pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look non-threatening – 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 pop-up notifications. Rufixeadv.com web page is controlled by fraudsters, who intendedly show hundreds and thousands of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic pop-up advertisements into a storm of ads. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But troubles are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing that touches illegal ads, ruFixeAdv pop-up advertisements lack legit deals to offer. Even when hackers make the ads looking similar to ones from well-known retailers, the website 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 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, ruFixeAdv 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 ruFixeAdv pop-ups?

Fortunately, ruFixeAdv pop-up advertisements removal is not very complicated. They sit in the web browser and can’t conceal themselves on a disk. However, as I stated above, some pop-up ads may introduce malicious software to your system. It is hard to predict all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a poor idea. Thus, after disabling the pop-ups the best option is to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that if you have never allowed pop-up notifications, but they still appeared. This situation may point at malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware removal purposes, because of its system recovery functionality 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, 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 ruFixeAdv 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 ruFixeAdv Pop-ups?

Name: ruFixeAdv

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