Remove Shovecoffee Virus — How to Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Shovecoffee pop-up alerts can show up out of the blue, covering the content of the site you visited or opening your browser when you don’t wish it to be opened.

Clicking on the Shovecoffee promotion can lead to the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this post, you will see the guide of Shovecoffee popups clearing in multiple manners, and also examining your computer for extra malware presence.

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What are Shovecoffee pop-ups?

Shovecoffee popups are a consequence of adware presence. Adware is a kind of malware that demonstrates to you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click promotions, which creates a substantial volume of revenue for adware distributors. These advertisements might include explicit composition, or have a web link to malicious content/website, considering that adware maintainers have no purpose to inspect the goodness of the content they are going to reveal – their single target is money.

Shovecoffee push notification

Shovecoffee push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is a very good, cheap and also extremely efficient advertising tool1. It makes it possible for the seller to attach the buyers’ interest to their site, and the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they want to buy. When the consumer will get a pop-up alert that the TV set he wishes to purchase is available at the online shop he/she checked out earlier with a 15% price cut, one will certainly use this possibility and get it. Taking into consideration the incredibly low cost for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising method is a favourite thing amongst the advertising departments of large online retailers.

However, such a rewarding strategy could not be missed by malware developers. Potential to show the popup advertisements by force to the victims of malware invasion is an excellent basis for malevolent tricks with the popup ads. And Shovecoffee.com advertisements is one of hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a short summary for the Shovecoffee site
Site Shovecoffee.com
Hosting AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 172.67.208.40
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior Pcsoftwaresafeties, Adthereis, Ysearches
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Shovecoffee virus?

There are a huge amount of methods of getting infected by the adware that cause the Shovecoffee popups tornado. A lion’s part of this malware instances is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Freeware can likewise be downloaded from the main site, and the adware is offered as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A lot of people regularly utilize the unreliable programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, various utilities that are free, and even hacked programs. Every one of these kinds of software are risky, because it is extremely easy to include a Shovecoffee malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Shovecoffee popup malware may likewise be concealed in the ad somewhere on the unusual web page. Such websites are usually packed with bright and blinking advertisements, and their proprietors generally approve any promos to be placed on their page. Thus, clicking on such banners is a risky thing: only the advertisement provider knows what will happen when you press this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or unwanted programs, you may also receive something much more risky, like ransomware or coin miner; the substantial share of coin miners circulation is exactly after the malicious advertisements.

People dislike popups

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

Potentially undesirable applications, like Shovecoffee popup virus can cause a lot of different troubles on your computer. Distracting is not the only problem – pop-ups may display you the advertisements, where you are offered to download one more dubious application, or “a effective security tool”. Scareware is usually distributed with the use of the last motto. Potentially undesirable applications, in turn, may have spyware functions. And it is quite hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a legit one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related ads are also used as a spreading method by different trojan viruses, for example – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such malware is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you 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 personal computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation may become much more serious, and it will be much harder to deal with it without data and money loss. It is recommended to eliminate the viruses with anti-malware applications as soon as possible.

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

The tutorial of Shovecoffee adware elimination consists of 2 parts. Initially, we need to remove the malware, and then deal with the consequences of its activity. The elimination task is pretty simple, because it may be done even with making use of Microsoft Defender – anti-malware software that is available on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. However, as a result of its substantial resources utilization, as well as some problems that can be serious for some categories of individuals, Defender is often turned off by the users, so its utilization is most likely impossible. In addition, different trojan viruses have the ability to shut off the embedded antivirus. It is better to use the separated program that will not have such weakness.

I would certainly advise you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven security device that will definitely wipe out the malware from your personal computer and create an invulnerable shield with a Proactive protection feature. But let’s handle Shovecoffee adware first.

Removing Shovecoffee 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.
  • Gridinsoft Anti-Malware during the scan process

  • 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.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware scan results

  • When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Shovecoffee malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware - After Cleaning

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. 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 web browsers are reset, you need to make sure that your web browser will definitely be connected the right DNS while connecting to the web page you need. Make a text file titled “hosts” on your computer’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following text3:

# 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.

Nevertheless, there is one trouble that makes the things much harder to fix, especially without the anti-malware software. The majority of adware variants that are used to show you the Shovecoffee pop-up advertisements are altering the deep browser settings, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to change your browser settings after your machine 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 responding for ~ 30 seconds, and after that it will be back to the typical, until you try to open settings again.

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.

Tools tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

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.

Reset Browser Settings tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

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 Shovecoffee Pop-ups?

Name: Shovecoffee

Description: Shovecoffee - 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 Shovecoffee.com push notifications?” or “why do Shovecoffee.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Shovecoffee 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 pop-up advertisements on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware review and also the reasons why I recommend it for malware removal.
  3. 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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