How to remove Safecity.vip pop-ups? — Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Safecity.vip pop-up alerts can appear unexpectedly, covering the material of the website you checked or opening your web browser when you don’t desire it to be opened.

Clicking on the Safecity.vip ad may result in the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the guide of Safecity.vip popups removal in multiple ways, as well as inspecting your system for additional viruses existence.

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What are Safecity.vip pop-ups?

Safecity.vip popups are a result of adware action. Adware is a sort of malware that shows you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which generates a substantial amount of income for adware suppliers. These ads might have explicit material, or have a link to harmful content/website, considering that adware maintainers have no purpose to inspect the goodness of the web content they are going to reveal – their single target is money.

Safecity.vip push notification

Safecity.vip push notification.

Pop-up promotions itself is a very good, cheap and really successful advertising method1. It makes it possible for the seller to link the customers’ interest to their site, and the buyers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they want to purchase. When the consumer will receive a pop-up alert that the TV set he desires to purchase is provided at the online store he/she checked out earlier with a 15% price cut, one will surely use this chance and purchase it. Taking into consideration the extremely low price for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising instrument is a favourite thing amidst the advertising teams of large internet retailers.

Nevertheless, such a profitable scheme could not be missed by malware creators. Ability to demonstrate the popup ads by force to the victims of malware attack is an ideal basis for malevolent tricks with the popup advertisements. And Safecity.vip advertisements is among hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a info for the Safecity.vip site
Site Safecity.vip
Hosting AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 172.67.147.236
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior Boot, News, News
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Safecity.vip virus?

There are a number of methods of becoming infected by the adware that trigger the Safecity.vip popups tornado. A lion’s part of this virus incidents is after the free software or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Free software can likewise be downloaded from the official web page, and the adware is offered as a legitimate bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A lot of people frequently work with the dubious programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, various apps that are free of cost, or even hacked programs. All of these types of applications are unsafe, since it is extremely easy to build in a Safecity.vip malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

Safecity.vip popup virus can also be hidden in the advertisement somewhere on the odd web page. Such sites are in most cases packed with intense and blinking ads, and their owners usually permit any promotions to be published on their page. For this reason, clicking such banners is a shot in the dark: only the advertisement contractor realizes what will happen when you click this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or unwanted programs, you can likewise receive something much more threatening, like ransomware or coin miner; the large share of coin miners distribution is exactly after the malicious promotions.

People dislike popups

The statistic shows that people dislike popup advertising more than other types of promotions

Potentially unwanted programs, like Safecity.vip popup virus can provoke a wide range of different troubles on your computer. Distracting is not the only effect – pop-up notifications may present you the banners, where you are offered to get one more strange program, or “a effective security tool”. Scareware is often spread with the last motto. Potentially unwanted programs, in turn, may have spyware functions. And it is pretty hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a legit one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related promotions are also chosen as a distribution way by various trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such viruses is 100% unwanted, and can cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And even if you are not interacting with these banners, they can be clicked by whoever who also makes use of your PC – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the things may become much more serious, and it will be much harder to deal with it without data loss. It is recommended to remove the viruses with anti-malware programs as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Safecity.vip pop-up advertisements?

The manual of Safecity.vip adware elimination includes 2 parts. Initially, we need to get rid of the malware, and then correct the consequences of its action. The removal task is quite easy, since it may be performed even with making use of Microsoft Defender – security software that is available on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nonetheless, due to its substantial resources utilization, along with some errors that can be pivotal for some types of individuals, Defender is oftentimes turned off by the users, so its usage is probably impossible. Furthermore, a variety of trojan viruses can turn off the embedded antivirus. It is much better to use the separated program that will not have such exposures.

I would certainly advise you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven antivirus device that will certainly eliminate the malware from your personal computer and also create an impenetrable shield with a Proactive protection feature. However, let’s handle Safecity.vip adware initially.

Removing Safecity.vip popup virus with GridinSoft Anti-Malware

  • Download and install GridinSoft Anti-Malware. After the installation, you will be offered to perform the Standard Scan. Approve this action.
  • Gridinsoft Anti-Malware during the scan process

  • Standard scan checks the logical disk where the system files are stored, together with the files of programs you have already installed. The scan lasts up to 6 minutes.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware scan results

  • When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Safecity.vip malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware - After Cleaning

Now, when the computer is clean of viruses, we can proceed to the browser reset. You can do this step manually, as well as with the use of GridinSoft Anti-Malware.

Reset browser settings to default

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 web browsers are reset, you need to make sure that your web browser will be connected the right DNS while connecting to the site you need. Create a text file named “hosts” on your computer’s desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following lines3:

# 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.

Nonetheless, there is one problem that makes the things a lot more difficult to repair, particularly without the anti-malware program. The majority of adware versions that are utilized to show you the Safecity.vip pop-up promotions are modifying the deep browser setups, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to change your browser settings after your PC was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will collapse quickly. Sometimes, you will see no crash, however, huge lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 secs, and afterwards it will be back to the typical, up until you attempt to open settings one more time.

Reset your browser settings 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 can see the list of the options for each browser. By default, they are set up in the manner which 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 last is also able to reset the HOSTS file without any additional commands.

How to Remove Safecity.vip Pop-ups?

Name: Safecity.vip

Description: Safecity.vip - 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 Safecity.vip push notifications?” or “why do Safecity.vip pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Safecity.vip 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 pop-up advertisements on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware overview and also the reasons why I advise it for malware elimination.
  3. 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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