Remove Safewinodws Virus — How to Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Safewinodws pop-up notices may appear unexpectedly, covering the content of the website you explored or opening your browser when you don’t need it to be opened.

Clicking on the Safewinodws promotion may cause the injection of other malware or unwanted programs. In this guide, you will see the tutorial of Safewinodws popups removal in various methods, as well as inspecting your personal computer for additional viruses presence.

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What are Safewinodws pop-ups?

Safewinodws popups are a result of adware activity. Adware is a kind of malware that suggests you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which produces a substantial volume of revenue for adware distributors. These promotions might consist of explicit content, or have a link to malevolent content/website, due to the fact that adware maintainers have no purpose to inspect the goodness of the content they are going to reveal – their solitary target is money.

Safewinodws push notification

Safewinodws push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is a good, affordable and also extremely efficient marketing solution1. It allows the vendor to attach the customers’ attention to their website, as well as the buyers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they intend to purchase. When the customer will receive a pop-up notification that the TV set he desires to buy is available at the online shop he/she visited previously with a 15% price cut, one will surely use this chance and get it. Considering the very low cost for the popups and their targeting, such a marketing method is a favourite thing among the advertising departments of large online retailers.

However, such a successful scheme could not be missed by virus developers. Option to show the popup advertisements by force to the victims of malware invasion is a great basis for evil-minded adjustments with the popup advertisements. And Safewinodws.com advertisements is one of hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a short details for the Safewinodws
SiteSafewinodws.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
Infection TypeAdware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address104.21.79.150
SymptomsAnnoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behaviorVideobonus, Bingocaptchapoint, Ptonnerven
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Safewinodws virus?

There are a lot of ways of becoming infected by the adware that trigger the Safewinodws popups tornado. A lion’s part of this computer virus incidents is after the free software or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Free software can likewise be downloaded from the main site, and the adware is offered as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A huge amount of people regularly work with the unreliable programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, various utilities that are free, or even hacked programs. Every one of these kinds of software are dangerous, because it is quite simple to integrate a Safewinodws malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Safewinodws popup malware can likewise be hidden in the advertisement somewhere on the strange website. Such web pages are typically loaded with intense and blinking advertisements, and their owners typically permit any type of promos to be posted on their web page. For this reason, clicking on such banners is a shot in the dark: only the advertisement provider knows what will occur when you press this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or unwanted programs, you may likewise get something a lot more threatening, like ransomware or coin miner; the large share of coin miners distribution is exactly after the malicious advertisements.

People dislike popups

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

Potentially unwanted applications, like Safewinodws popup virus may cause a wide range of troubles on your personal computer. Distracting is not the single effect – pop-up notifications can present you the banners, where you are offered to download one more unknown program, or “a amazing security tool”. Scareware is often spread under the last slogun. Potentially unwanted programs, in turn, can have spyware functionality. And it is quite hard to distinguish the undesirable app from a good one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and fake antiviruses, popup-related promotions are also exploited as a spreading way by various trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such malware is 100% unwanted, and can cost you hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not interacting with these promotions, they may be clicked by someone who also uses your computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the things can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without information loss. It is recommended to eliminate the viruses with antivirus programs as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Safewinodws pop-up advertisements?

The guide of Safewinodws adware elimination includes 2 sections. First, we need to exterminate the malware, and then fix the results of its activity. The elimination process is very easy, due to the fact that it may be done even with using Microsoft Defender – security software that is present on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. Nonetheless, due to its large resources utilization, along with some problems that can be critical for some types of individuals, Defender is frequently turned off by the users, so its usage is most likely impossible. In addition, different trojan viruses can turn off the embedded antivirus. It is better to make use of the separated program that will not have such vulnerabilities.

I’d advise you to use Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven antivirus tool that will certainly eliminate the malware from your personal computer and also create an invulnerable cover with a Proactive protection function. However, let’s handle Safewinodws adware first.

Removing Safewinodws 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 Safewinodws 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 browsers are reset, you need to make sure that your browser will connect the proper DNS while connecting to the website you need. Create a text file named “hosts” on your desktop, then open it and fill it with the following content3:

# 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.

However, there is one problem that makes things a lot more difficult to fix, specifically without the anti-malware program. The majority of adware variants that are used to show you the Safewinodws pop-up advertisements are adjusting the deep browser setups, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to change your browser settings after your computer was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly crash soon. In some cases, you will see no crash, however, large lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 seconds, and afterwards it will be back to the normal, till 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 Safewinodws Pop-ups?

Name: Safewinodws

Description: Safewinodws - 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 Safewinodws.com push notifications?” or “why do Safewinodws.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Safewinodws 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 ads on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware overview and also the reasons why I suggest 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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