Remove Scan-pro-guard Pop-up Virus — How to Remove?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Scan-pro-guard pop-up notices can show up unexpectedly, covering the content of the page you visited or opening your web browser when you don’t want it to be opened.

Clicking the Scan-pro-guard promotion may cause the injection of other malware or unwanted programs. In this post, you will see the guideline of Scan-pro-guard popups removal in various methods, as well as inspecting your computer for extra viruses existence.

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What are Scan-pro-guard pop-ups?

Scan-pro-guard popups are a consequence of adware activity. Adware is a sort of malware that demonstrates to you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which generates a significant amount of earnings for adware distributors. These advertisements might consist of sometimes shocking information, or have a web link to harmful content/website, considering that adware maintainers have no purpose to inspect the goodness of the content they are going to reveal – their solitary target is cash.

Scan-pro-guard push notification

Scan-pro-guard push notification.

Pop-up advertising itself is a very good, low-cost and also really effective advertising instrument1. It allows the vendor to link the buyers’ attention to their site, as well as the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they intend to buy. When the person will get a pop-up alert that the TV set he likes to purchase is provided at the online shop he/she checked out previously with a 15% discount, one will surely use this opportunity and purchase it. Considering the very low price for the popups and their targeting, such a promotion and marketing method is a favourite thing among the advertising teams of large internet retail stores.

Nonetheless, such a profitable strategy could not be missed by virus creators. Ability to demonstrate the popup ads forcibly to the targets of malware attack is an ideal basis for malicious adjustments with the popup promotions. And Scan-pro-guard.com ads is one of hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a short summary for the Scan-pro-guard
Site Scan-pro-guard.com
Hosting AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 188.114.96.3
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior News, Notificationnewsspace, Polinbhee321
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Scan-pro-guard virus?

There are a plenty of methods of becoming infected by the adware that create the Scan-pro-guard popups storm. 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 also be downloaded from the main web page, and the adware is offered as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A huge amount of people frequently use the dubious programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, different apps that are free of cost, and even hacked programs. Every one of these sorts of programs are dangerous, because it is very easy to integrate a Scan-pro-guard malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Scan-pro-guard popup virus may additionally be concealed in the promotion somewhere on the unusual site. Such sites are generally filled with bright and blinking advertisements, and their owners typically approve any type of promos to be placed on their web page. For this reason, clicking such banners is a shot in the dark: only the ad provider realizes what will happen when you click this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you can additionally receive something a lot more hazardous, like ransomware or coin miner; the substantial 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 programs, like Scan-pro-guard pop-up virus may cause a wide range of different problems on your PC. Distracting is not the only effect – pop-up notifications can display you the banners, where you are offered to get another unknown program, or “a amazing anti-malware tool”. Scareware is often distributed with the use of the last slogun. Potentially undesirable programs, in turn, can have spyware functionality. And it is very hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a normal one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related banners are also used as a spreading method by various trojan viruses, for example – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such malware is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you several hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not interacting with these banners, they can be clicked by whoever who also uses your personal computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation may become much more serious, and it will be much harder to deal with it without data loss. It is recommended to eliminate the viruses with antivirus applications as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Scan-pro-guard pop-up advertisements?

The manual of Scan-pro-guard adware elimination includes 2 parts. Initially, we need to get rid of the malware, and afterwards repair the consequences of its activity. The elimination procedure is very simple, due to the fact that it can be done even with using Microsoft Defender – security tool that is present on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, because of its substantial resources utilization, as well as some defects that can be pivotal for some groups of individuals, Defender is frequently disabled by the users, so its utilization is probably impossible. What’s more, different trojan viruses are capable to disable the embedded antivirus. It is better to use the separated program that will not have such weakness.

I’d suggest you to use Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven antivirus device that will surely remove the viruses from your system and make an impenetrable cover with a Proactive protection feature. But let’s manage Scan-pro-guard adware initially.

Removing Scan-pro-guard 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 Scan-pro-guard 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 definitely be connected the proper DNS while connecting to the website you need. Create a text file named “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, after that 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.

Nevertheless, there is one problem that makes the things a lot more difficult to repair, especially without the anti-malware program. A lot of adware variants that are utilized to show you the Scan-pro-guard pop-up promotions are modifying the deep browser setups, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to fix your browser settings after your machine was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly crash quickly. Sometimes, you will see no crash, but significant lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 secs, and afterwards it will be back to the typical, till you try 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 Scan-pro-guard Pop-ups?

Name: Scan-pro-guard

Description: Scan-pro-guard - 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 Scan-pro-guard.com push notifications?” or “why do Scan-pro-guard.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Scan-pro-guard 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 advise it for malware removal.
  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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