Remove ShortUrl.ac Virus — How to Fix Guide

ShortUrl.ac pop-ups appear when you do not expect, distracting and irritating you. Still, they are way more than simple pop-up ads – their nature is surely malignant, and they may install other malicious stuff to your device. In this article, I will guide you on how to remove ShortUrl.ac pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with ShortUrl.ac push notifications will be ineffective at best. At worst, the pages it can open can introduce malware to your system. These push notifications 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 ShortUrl.ac 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 advertisements and ShortUrl.ac notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Common push notifications are offered for you to enable with a understandable purpose – keep you aware about the latest articles, discounts and so on. It is a useful tool to help your website to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested ones to have the best deal.

Brief description of the Shorturl.ac pop-ups:

ShortUrl.ac pop-up advertisements, in contrast, have a deal with unlegit web pages. You will generally see the proposition to enable them following the redirection from another page. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless it throws you to such a dubious place. At that point, enabling pop-up ads is offered under the guise of the anti-bot check-up. Alternatively, the sites can deny showing you the content unless you enable these pop-up advertisements. These requirements should already raise suspicion, as websites generally have a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Spectating such an demand should be the reason to skip the page right away. Sometimes, even when you click “Allow”, you will not see the site – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the push notifications.

How does this work?

Most of web browsers support turning on push notifications from websites. Sites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content they like. It may be a promotion of the product posted on this site, or an ad of their partner page. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but interacting with it will redirect you to site Y – because a referral link to that website was embedded.

Crooks bear 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 banners of anyone they contract with. As you can suppose, no legit organisations will have a business with fraudsters. All the ShortUrl.ac popups you may see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same user may get into a trap of multiple pop-up spamming sites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a negligible commission for one viewer, but when you have hundreds of victims and show them hundreds of ads every day – that is a way bigger sum. Even though most of such banners giving no result at all, it can still give all the parties a lot of money.

Are ShortUrl.ac pop-up ads dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they may look non-threatening – just a colourful window that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you used to see in pop-up advertisements. Shorturl.ac site is controlled by fraudsters, who intentionally throw hundreds of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any manners of advertising and can make sporadic pop-ups into a storm of ads. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But troubles are not over at this point.

As with any other thing that touches illegal ads, ShortUrl.ac push notifications lack legit offers. Even though crooks make the ads looking similar to ones from well-known retailers, the website these banners 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-up 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, ShortUrl.ac 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 ShortUrl.ac pop-ups?

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to do 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 manually

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 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:

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

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).

1. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.