Serch12 Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Serch12 pop-up notifications may show up unexpectedly, covering the content of the website you checked or opening your browser when you don’t want it to be opened.

Clicking on the Serch12 advertisement may trigger the injection of other malware or unwanted programs. In this post, you will see the manual of Serch12 popups clearing in a couple of ways, and also checking your system for other viruses presence.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Serch12 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.

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What are Serch12 pop-ups?

Serch12 popups are an effect of adware activity. Adware is a type of malware that demonstrates to you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click advertisements, which generates a massive amount of income for adware representatives. These promotions might consist of sometimes shocking material, or have a link to malicious content/website, due to the fact that adware maintainers have no reason to examine the goodness of the content they are going to reveal – their solitary target is money.

Serch12 push notification.

Pop-up advertising itself is an excellent, affordable and also extremely efficient advertising instrument¹. It makes it possible for the seller to attach the buyers’ interest to their site, and the customers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they want to buy. When the person will receive a pop-up notification that the TV set he likes to buy is available at the online store he/she checked out earlier with a 15% price cut, one will undoubtedly use this chance and get it. Considering the incredibly small cost for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising tool is a favourite thing amidst the advertising teams of big internet retailers.

Nonetheless, such a successful scheme could not be missed by virus developers. Option to demonstrate the popup ads forcibly to the targets of malware attack is a great basis for malevolent manipulations with the popup promotions. And Serch12.biz advertisements is among hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a short info for the Serch12 site

How have I got the Serch12 virus?

There are a plenty of methods of getting infected by the adware that cause the Serch12 popups storm. A lion’s part of this malware instances is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Free software may also be downloaded from the official website, and the adware is presented as a legitimate bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A plenty of individuals often use the dubious programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, different utilities that are free of cost, and even hacked programs. All of these sorts of applications are risky, because it is extremely easy to include a Serch12 malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Serch12 popup malware may also be concealed in the promotion somewhere on the odd website. Such web pages are generally loaded with bright and blinking ads, and their owners typically permit any kind of promotions to be published on their page. For this reason, clicking on such banners is a risky thing: only the advertisement provider realizes what will occur when you press this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or unwanted programs, you can additionally receive something much more threatening, like ransomware or coin miner; the substantial share of coin miners distribution is exactly after the malicious ads.

The statistic shows that people dislike popup advertising more than other types of promotions

Potentially unwanted applications, like Serch12 pop-up virus can provoke a lot of different troubles on your PC. Distracting is not the only effect – pop-ups can present you the ads, where you are offered to download one more unknown application, or “a perfect security tool”. Scareware is often distributed with the use of the last motto. Potentially unwanted programs, in turn, can have spyware functions. And it is very hard to distinguish the undesirable app from a normal one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related banners are also exploited as a distribution way by various trojan viruses, for instance – 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 advertisements, they can be clicked by someone who also makes use of your PC – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without data and money loss. It is recommended to eliminate the viruses with antivirus programs as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Serch12 pop-up advertisements?

The manual of Serch12 adware elimination consists of 2 sections. Initially, we need to get rid of the malware, and after that deal with the consequences of its activity. The removal process is pretty easy, due to the fact that it can be done even with making use of Microsoft Defender – anti-virus program that is available on all computers with Windows 8/10. However, due to its substantial resources consumption, as well as some errors that may be serious for some categories of users, Defender is often disabled by the users, so its use is probably impossible. Furthermore, a wide range of trojan viruses are able to disable the embedded antivirus. It is much better to use the separated program that will not have such exposures.

I would certainly suggest you to use Gridinsoft Anti-Malware² – a well-proven anti-malware device that will definitely exterminate the malware from your computer and also create an invulnerable cover with a Proactive protection feature. But let’s take care of Serch12 adware first.

Removing Serch12 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.

• 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.

• When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Serch12 malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.

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. 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 web browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your web browser will definitely be connected the accurate DNS while connecting to the website you need. Create a text file named “hosts” on your computer’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following content³:

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.

However, there is one issue that makes the things much more difficult to repair, especially without the anti-malware software. Most of adware variants that are utilized to show you the Serch12 pop-up promotions are altering the deep browser setups, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to change your browser settings after your PC was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will crash quickly. In certain cases, you will see no crash, however, huge 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 attempt 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.

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.

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 Serch12 Pop-ups?

Name: Serch12

Description: Serch12 - 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 Serch12.biz push notifications?” or “why do Serch12.biz pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Serch12 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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1. More about pop-up ads on Wikipedia.
2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware review and the reasons why I suggest it for malware elimination.
3. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.