Remove Secure Captcha Top Pop-up Virus — How to Remove?

Secure Captcha Top pop-ups appear out of the blue, distracting and annoying you. Still, they are much more than annoying pop-ups – their origins is surely malignant, and they may introduce other malware to your device. In this post, I will show you the guide how to remove Secure Captcha Top pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Secure Captcha Top push notifications will be ineffective at best. In worst case scenario, the websites it can open can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements can also promote fake online shopping websites 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 Secure Captcha Top 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.

DOWNLOAD NOW

Gridinsoft Anti-Malware 6-day trial available.
EULA | Privacy Policy | 10% Off Coupon

What are Secure Captcha Top 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 pop-up advertisements and Secure Captcha Top notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Common push notifications are offered for you to enable on different sites with a legitimate purpose – notify you about the latest posts, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful thing to help your website to keep visitors and help the interested visitors to have the best price.

Brief description of the Securecaptchatop.top pop-up ads:

Secure Captcha Top pop-up notifications, on the other hand, have a deal with unlegit web pages. You will generally witness the proposition to turn them on after a redirection from another page. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless it throws you into such a dubious place. At that point, enabling pop-up ads is offered under the guise of the anti-DDoS check-up. In other cases, the websites may deny showing you the contents unless you turn on these pop-ups. These demands should raise suspicion, as sites usually feature a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing this requirement should be the reason to close the page right away. Sometimes, even when you click “Allow”, you will not get to the website – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-ups.

Secure Captcha Top push notification.

How does this work?

The vast majority of web browsers support turning on pop-ups from websites. Sites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content of their choice. It may be an advertisement of the product listed for sale on this particular website, or a promotion of their partner page. As a result, you can see the pop-up from site X, but opening it will throw you to website Y – because a referral link to the latter was built in.

Cybercriminals rely on this ability in their attempt to gain money through advertising. They trick victims into turning on pop-ups, and after that just spread numerous promotions of other crooks they contract with. As you may suppose, no normal organisations will contract with fraudsters. All the Secure Captcha Top notifications you may see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same user can get into a trap of multiple pop-up spamming web pages, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a negligible pay for one person, but when you can send ads to a huge number of users and make it hundreds of times every 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 Secure Captcha Top pop-ups dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look safe – just a colourful pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you generally see in pop-up notifications. Securecaptchatop.top site is ruled by crooks, who deliberately throw hundreds of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can make sporadic pop-up advertisements into a storm of ads. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all troubles these pop-up ads carry.

As any other thing that touches illegal ads, Secure Captcha Top pop-ups do not contain any legit offers. Even though crooks make the banners similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the website these banners 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 notifications 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, Secure Captcha Top 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 Secure Captcha Top pop-ups?

Fortunately, Secure Captcha Top pop-up ads removal is pretty easy. They reside in the web browser and can’t hide themselves in the system. Nevertheless, as I stated above, some pop-ups can promote malicious programs to your system. It is nearly impossible to describe all of the cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is inconvenient. Therefore, after removing the source of the pop-up notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. I’d especially recommend that if you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up advertisements, and they still appeared. This situation can point at malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware checkup purposes, thanks to its abilities of system recovery and multi-layer detection system.

First and foremost, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in both manual and automatic manner. The former, obviously, takes more time to complete and can 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 site 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 Secure Captcha Top 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).

1. More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
2. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.