Remove Secure-your-device Pop-up Virus — How to Remove?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Secure-your-device push notifications appear when you do not expect, distracting and irritating you. However, that is much more than annoying pop-ups – their origins is purely malignant, and they may bring other malicious stuff to your system. In this post, I will show you the guide how to remove Secure-your-device push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Secure-your-device pop-up notifications will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the websites it can throw you to may introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements may also advertise fake 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.

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What are Secure-your-device 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 Secure-your-device pop-ups is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal push notifications are offered for you to enable with a benevolent purpose – keep you aware about the latest posts, discounts and so on. It is a useful tool to help your site to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested users to have the best price.

Short summary of the Secure-your-device.com pop-ups:
NameSecure-your-device.com
HostingAS59253 Leaseweb Asia Pacific pte. ltd.
Singapore, Singapore
IP Address23.106.248.15
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorNews, Monadv, Fmyzty
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Secure-your-device pop-ups, in contrast, are related to less legit sites. You will commonly see the proposition to enable them after a redirection from another site. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless they throw you into such a questionable place. In this case, enabling pop-ups is offered as the anti-bot filtering. In other cases, the websites can deny showing you the contents unless you enable these push notifications. These requirements should be the red flag, as sites generally feature a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing such an demand should be the reason to close the page right away. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not get to the web page – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up advertisements.

Secure-your-device push notification

Secure-your-device push notification.

How does it work?

Most of browsers support turning on push notifications from sites. Websites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content of their choice. It may be an advertisement of the page listed on this website, or a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but opening it will throw you to website Y – because a link to that website was embedded.

Cybercriminals bear on this ability in their attempt to gain money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing them to show the banners, and then just spread hundreds of ads of other crooks they have a deal with. As you can suppose, no benevolent organisations will contract with fraudsters. All the Secure-your-device notifications you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. At some point, the same user may get into a trap of several pop-up spamming sites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The ads these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a miserable commission for one viewer, but when you have hundreds of victims and make it hundreds of times each day – that is a much bigger sum. Despite the majority of such banners giving no result at all, it may still give all the participants a lot of profit.

Are Secure-your-device pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they can look harmless – just a colourful pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the things this window promotes differ sharply from what you used to see in pop-up advertisements. Secure-your-device.com web page is controlled by crooks, who intentionally throw tons of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any common sense and can launch sporadic pop-up ads into a storm of banners. For weak computers, that may be enough to make the system slower. But troubles are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing that touches illegal ads, Secure-your-device push notifications don’t have legit offers. Even when hackers make the ads similar to ones from well-known retailers, the site 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 ads 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-your-device pop-up advertisements are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Secure-your-device pop-ups?

Fortunately, Secure-your-device pop-up advertisements removal is not very complicated. They sit in the web browser and can’t hide themselves in the system. Nevertheless, as I stated before, some pop-up advertisements can introduce malware to your computer. It is nearly impossible to predict all cases, and manual malware removal is a bad idea. For that reason, after removing the source of the pop-up notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. I’d especially recommend that in the case when you have never allowed pop-up notifications, and they still appeared. That can be a sign of malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both system recovery and malware checkup purposes, thanks to its system recovery functionality 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, 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.

Tools tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

You may 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.

Reset Browser Settings tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

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. 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 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:


# 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.

Scan your system for possible viruses

After removing the Secure-your-device 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.

GridinSoft Anti-Malware during the scan 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).

GridinSoft scan finished

How to Remove Secure-your-device Pop-ups?

Name: Secure-your-device

Description: Secure-your-device - 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 Secure-your-device.com push notifications?” or “why do Secure-your-device.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Secure-your-device 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 this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
  2. 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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