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

ScadsStar pop-ups appear when you do not expect, distracting and irritating you. Still, that is slightly more than just notifications – their nature is clearly malignant, and they can bring other malicious stuff to your device. In this article, I will guide you on how to remove ScadsStar pop-up notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with ScadsStar pop-ups will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the pages it can throw you to may introduce malware to your system. These push notifications can 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.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing ScadsStar 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 ScadsStar pop-up notifications?

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 ScadsStar pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Common pop-up advertisements are offered for you to enable on different sites with a straightforward purpose – keep you aware about the fresh publications, discounts and so on. It is an effective approach to help your website to retain visitors and help the interested ones to have the best price.

Short summary of the Scadsstar.com pop-ups:

ScadsStar push notifications, on the other hand, have a deal with unlegit websites. You will commonly observe the offer to enable them following the redirection from another website. It’s OK to see redirects unless it throws you into such a questionable place. At that point, enabling pop-up ads is served under the guise of the anti-DDoS filtering. Alternatively, the websites can refuse to show you the content unless you turn on these pop-up advertisements. These requirements should be the red flag, as websites usually feature a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Spectating this offer should be the reason to skip the site right away. Sometimes, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not get to the website – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up advertisements.

ScadsStar push notification.

How does this work?

The majority of browsers support enabling pop-ups from sites. Sites, on the other hand, may send notifications with the content of their choice. It can be an advertisement of the product listed for sale on this site, as well as a promotion of their partner page. As a result, you can see the push notification from site X, but interacting with it will redirect you to website Y – because a link to the latter was embedded.

Cybercriminals rely on this feature in their attempt to earn money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing the pop-ups, and after that just spread hundreds of ads of anyone they have a deal with. As you may suppose, no image-caring companies will have a deal with fraudsters. All the ScadsStar push ads you may see lead to other fraudulent sites. In some cases, the same victim can get into a trap of multiple pop-up spamming websites, and its 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 have a huge number of users and make it hundreds of times each day – that is a much bigger sum. Even though the majority of such banners giving no result at all, it may still give all the parties a lot of money.

Are ScadsStar 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. Scadsstar.com website is ruled by fraudsters, who deliberately show tons of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can launch sporadic pop-ups into a storm of banners. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all problems these pop-up notifications carry.

As with any other thing that touches illegal advertising, ScadsStar pop-ups lack legit deals to offer. Even when crooks make the banners similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, 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-ups 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, ScadsStar 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 ScadsStar pop-ups?

Fortunately, ScadsStar pop-up ads removal is not very complicated. They reside in the web browser and cannot conceal themselves among system files. Nonetheless, as I stated before, some pop-ups may promote malware to your computer. It is nearly impossible to describe all of the cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a poor idea. Thus, after removing the source of the push notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. I’d especially recommend that in the case when you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up ads, and they still appeared. This situation can point at adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware checkup purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and advanced detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to do in both manual and automatic manner. 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.

You can 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 website 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 ScadsStar 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 ScadsStar Pop-ups?

Name: ScadsStar

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