Securecaptcha.top push notifications appear when you do not expect, distracting and irritating you. Still, that is much more than just notifications – their essence is surely malignant, and they can introduce other malicious stuff to your system. In this article, I will guide you on how to remove Securecaptcha.top pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.
Any interaction with Securecaptcha.top pop-up advertisements will be ineffective at best. In worst case scenario, the websites it can show you may introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements can also advertise fake online 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.
What are Securecaptcha.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 ads and Securecaptcha.top pop-ups is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal push notifications are offered for you to enable with a understandable purpose – notify you about the new posts, discounts and so on. It is an effective approach to help your site to retain visitors and help the interested ones to have the best deal.
Brief summary of the Securecaptcha.top pop-up ads:
Name | Securecaptcha.top |
Hosting | AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc. United States, San Francisco |
IP Address | 104.21.63.229 |
Malware type | Adware1 |
Effect | Unwanted pop-up advertisements |
Hazard level | Medium |
Malware source | Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites |
Similar behavior | Checkrobotpage, Trunapol, Yremovementxv |
Removal method | To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC |
Securecaptcha.top pop-up ads, in contrast, have a deal with untrustworthy web pages. You will commonly witness the proposition to enable them following the redirection from another page. It’s OK to see redirects unless they throw you into such a questionable place. At that point, turning on pop-ups is offered as the anti-DDoS check. In other cases, the sites may deny showing you the contents unless you turn on these pop-up ads. These requirements should already raise suspicion, as sites generally have a different anti-bot mechanism. Spectating such an demand should be the reason to close the page right away. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not see the website – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up advertisements.
How does this work?
The vast majority of browsers support turning on push notifications from sites. Websites, on the other hand, can send out notifications with the content they want. It can be a promotion of the product listed for sale on this website, as well as an ad of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but clicking it will throw you to site Y – because a link to that website was embedded.
Crooks rely on this ability in their approach to earn money using illegal advertising. They trick victims into allowing the pop-ups, and then just spread hundreds of ads of other crooks they contract with. As you can suppose, no benevolent organisations will have a business with fraudsters. All the Securecaptcha.top notifications you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. At some point, the same victim can be trapped by several pop-up spamming websites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.
The ads these rascals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It generally provides a miserable pay for one view, but when you can send ads to hundreds of users and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a way bigger sum. Even though the majority of these banners are ineffective, it may still bring all the parties a lot of profit.
Are Securecaptcha.top pop-up advertisements dangerous?
Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look harmless – just a colourful window 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. Securecaptcha.top site is controlled by crooks, who intentionally spread hundreds of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic pop-up ads into a hurricane of promotions. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But troubles are not over at this point.
As with any other thing that touches illegal ads, Securecaptcha.top pop-up ads don’t have legit deals to offer. Even though hackers make the ads similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the web page 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-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, Securecaptcha.top pop-up ads are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.
How to remove Securecaptcha.top pop-ups?
Fortunately, Securecaptcha.top pop-up notifications removal is not very complicated. They reside in the browser and cannot hide themselves among system files. Nonetheless, as I pointed out above, some pop-up notifications can promote malicious programs to your system. It is hard to show all of the cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a bad idea. Thus, after removing the source of the pop-up notifications it is recommended to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended in the case when you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up ads, and they still appeared. That may be a sign of malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware removal purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and superb detection system.
Initially, 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.
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.
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:
- Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option:
- 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:
- Open Menu tab (three strips in upper right corner) and click the “Help” button. In the appeared menu choose “troubleshooting information”:
- In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:
After choosing this option, you will see the next message:
If you use Google Chrome
- Open Settings tab, find the “Advanced” button. In the extended tab choose the “Reset and clean up” button:
- In the appeared list, click on the “Restore settings to their original defaults”:
- 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
- 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:
- 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 web page 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 Securecaptcha.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).
How to Remove Securecaptcha.top Pop-ups?
Name: Securecaptcha.top
Description: Securecaptcha.top - 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 Securecaptcha.top push notifications?” or “why do Securecaptcha.top pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Securecaptcha.top 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
User Review
( votes)References
- More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
- Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.