ShopNews2 Pop-up Ads Removal — How to Fix Your Browser?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
ShopNews2 pop-up advertisements appear when you do not expect, disturbing and annoying you. Nonetheless, they are much more than just notifications – their essence is cleanly malignant, and they can bring other malicious stuff to your device. In this article, I will show you how to remove ShopNews2 pop-up notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with ShopNews2 push notifications will be ineffective at best. At worst, the websites it can open may introduce malware to your system. These push notifications may 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.

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What are ShopNews2 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 ShopNews2 notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Common push notifications are offered for you to enable on different sites with a benevolent purpose – keep you aware about the new posts, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful thing to help your site to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested visitors to have the best price.

Brief description of the Shopnews2.xyz pop-ups:
NameShopnews2.xyz
HostingAS15317 Serverel Inc.
United States, Santa Clara
IP Address173.214.240.15
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorMajorinryes, News, News
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

ShopNews2 pop-up ads, on the other hand, have a deal with untrustworthy websites. You will generally witness the proposition to enable them following the redirection from another page. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless they throw you into such a dubious place. In this case, turning on pop-up notifications is offered under the guise of the anti-bot check. Alternatively, the websites can deny showing you the contents unless you apply these pop-up notifications. These requirements should raise suspicion, as sites generally have a different anti-bot mechanism. Spectating such an demand is a reason to leave the page right away. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the web page – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up notifications.

ShopNews2 push notification

ShopNews2 push notification.

How does it work?

The majority of browsers support turning on push notifications from websites. Sites, on the other hand, may send notifications with the content they like. It can be an advertisement of the product listed for sale on this website, or an ad of the page of their partner. As a result, you can see the pop-up from site X, but clicking it will redirect you to site Y – because a link to that website was built in.

Scoundrels bear on this ability in their attempt to earn money using illegal advertising. They trick users into turning on pop-ups, and after that just spread numerous ads of other crooks they contract with. As you may suppose, no image-caring organisations will have a deal with fraudsters. All the ShopNews2 push ads you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. In some cases, the same victim can get into a trap of multiple pop-up spamming web pages, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a miserable payment for one view, but when you can send ads to hundreds of users and make it hundreds of times each day – that is a way bigger sum. Despite the majority of these banners are ineffective, it can still bring all the parties a lot of profit.

Are ShopNews2 pop-up notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they may look harmless – just a colourful window that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you used to see in push notifications. Shopnews2.xyz website is controlled by fraudsters, who intentionally throw hundreds of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can make sporadic pop-up ads into a storm of promotions. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But troubles are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing that touches illegal ads, ShopNews2 pop-up advertisements do not contain any legit deals to offer. Even though hackers make the ads similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the site these ads will throw you to are completely different. And these pages may 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, ShopNews2 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 ShopNews2 pop-ups?

Fortunately, ShopNews2 pop-up advertisements removal is not very complicated. They reside in the web browser and cannot conceal themselves in the system. Nonetheless, as I told above, some pop-up notifications may deliver malicious software to your computer. It is nearly impossible to predict all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a poor idea. Therefore, after getting rid of the pop-up notifications it is recommended to use anti-malware software. That is especially recommended if you have never allowed push notifications, and they still appeared. This situation may be a sign of malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware scanning and removal purposes, thanks to its abilities of system recovery and superb 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.

Tools tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

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.

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 ShopNews2 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 ShopNews2 Pop-ups?

Name: ShopNews2

Description: ShopNews2 - 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 Shopnews2.xyz push notifications?” or “why do Shopnews2.xyz pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with ShopNews2 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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