Remove Serasearchtop Pop-up Ads — How to Fix Gude

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Serasearchtop pop-ups appear out of the blue, disturbing and irritating you. Still, they are slightly more than annoying pop-ups – their origins is clearly malignant, and they may install other malicious stuff to your device. In this post, I will show you the guide how to remove Serasearchtop pop-up notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Serasearchtop pop-up advertisements will be useless at best. At worst, the pages it can open can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements may also advertise 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.

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What are Serasearchtop push 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 pop-up notifications and Serasearchtop notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal pop-up notifications are offered for you to enable on different sites with a legitimate purpose – notify you about the latest articles, discounts and so on. It is a useful thing to help your site to keep visitors and help the interested visitors to have the best deal.

Brief description of the Serasearchtop.com pop-ups:
Name Serasearchtop.com
Hosting AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address 104.21.40.118
Malware type Adware1
Effect Unwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard level Medium
Malware source Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behavior Downladingsite, Battlehammer, Recutasseuccars
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Serasearchtop pop-up notifications, as opposed, are related to untrustworthy websites. You will generally observe the offer to enable them after a redirection from another page. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless it throws you into such a questionable place. In this case, turning on pop-ups is offered as the anti-bot check-up. Alternatively, the sites can refuse to show you the contents unless you apply these pop-up notifications. These demands should raise suspicion, as websites usually have a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing this demand should be the reason to leave the page doubtlessly. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the website – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up notifications.

Serasearchtop push notification

Serasearchtop push notification.

How does it work?

The majority of browsers support turning on push notifications from sites. Websites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content they like. It may be a promotion of the product or a page listed for sale on this particular site, as well as an ad of their partner page. As a result, you can see the pop-up from site X, but clicking it will redirect you to site Y – because a referral link to the latter was added.

Scoundrels bear on this feature in their attempt to earn money using illegal advertising. They trick users into allowing the pop-ups, and after that just spread numerous banners of other crooks they contract with. As you can suppose, no normal companies will contract with fraudsters. All the Serasearchtop push ads you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same victim may be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming websites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these rascals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a miserable payment for one viewer, but when you can send ads to hundreds of victims and make it hundreds of times every day – that is a much more significant sum. Despite the majority of such banners are ineffective, it can still give all the parties a lot of profit.

Are Serasearchtop pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they can look non-threatening – just a colourful window that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you generally see in push notifications. Serasearchtop.com website is ruled by crooks, who intentionally show hundreds of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic push notifications into a hurricane of promotions. For weak computers, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all problems these pop-up ads carry.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing related to illegal ads, Serasearchtop pop-up advertisements don’t have legit offers. Even though crooks make the banners looking similar to ones from well-known retailers, 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 push 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, Serasearchtop 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 Serasearchtop pop-ups?

Fortunately, Serasearchtop push notifications removal is pretty easy. They parasite in the browser and cannot conceal themselves among system files. Nevertheless, as I pointed out above, some pop-up advertisements may introduce malicious programs to your system. It is nearly impossible to describe all of the cases, and manual malware removal is a poor idea. Therefore, after disabling the push notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended in the case when you have never allowed pop-up notifications, and they still appeared. This situation can point at adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware checkup purposes, thanks to its system recovery functionality and multi-component 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 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.

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 website 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 Serasearchtop 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 Serasearchtop Pop-ups?

Name: Serasearchtop

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