Softsolution.me Pop-up Virus — How to Remove Unwanted Ads?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Softsolution.me push notifications appear out of the blue, detracting and irritating you. Nonetheless, they are slightly more than simple pop-ups – their nature is purely malignant, and they can bring other malware to your system. In this post, I will show you how to remove Softsolution.me pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Softsolution.me pop-up advertisements will be ineffective at best. At worst, the pages it can open may introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups can also advertise 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 Softsolution.me 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-ups and Softsolution.me pop-ups is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal pop-up ads are offered for you to enable with a benevolent purpose – keep you aware about the fresh posts, discounts and so on. It is a useful tool to help your site to retain visitors and help the interested users to have the best price.

Short summary of the Softsolution.me pop-ups:
NameSoftsolution.me
HostingAS47583 Hostinger International Limited
United States, Phoenix
IP Address191.96.56.146
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorNighridadered, Protocpz, Wpussystone
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Softsolution.me push notifications, on the other hand, are related to less legit websites. You will generally observe the offer to turn them on following the redirection from another site. Redirects are OK unless they throw you to such a questionable place. At that point, enabling pop-ups is offered under the guise of the anti-DDoS check-up. In other cases, the sites can refuse to show you the content unless you enable these push notifications. These requirements should be the red flag, as websites generally have a different anti-bot mechanism. Spectating this demand is a reason to leave the site doubtlessly. Sometimes, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the website – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up advertisements.

Softsolution.me push notification

Softsolution.me push notification.

How does it work?

The majority of web browsers support enabling pop-ups from websites. Websites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content they like. It may be a promotion of the product posted on this website, or an ad of the page of their partner. As a result, you can see the push notification from site X, but interacting with it will throw you to website Y – because a referral link to the latter was added.

Cybercriminals rely on this ability in their approach to gain money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing the pop-ups, and after that just spread numerous promotions of anyone they contract with. As you may suppose, no legit organisations will contract with fraudsters. All the Softsolution.me push ads you may see lead to other fraudulent sites. In some cases, the same user can get into a trap of several pop-up spamming websites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The promotions these rascals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a miserable pay for one view, but when you have a huge number of users and show them hundreds of ads every day – that is a way bigger sum. Even though the majority of these ads giving no result at all, it can still bring all the participants a lot of profit.

Are Softsolution.me pop-ups dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they may look safe – just a colourful pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you generally see in pop-up ads. Softsolution.me website is ruled by fraudsters, who intendedly spread hundreds and thousands of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can launch sporadic push notifications into a storm of promotions. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But problems are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing that touches illegal advertising, Softsolution.me pop-up ads don’t have legit deals to offer. Even though crooks make the ads looking similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, 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 pop-up ads 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, Softsolution.me 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 Softsolution.me pop-ups?

Fortunately, Softsolution.me pop-up ads removal is pretty easy. They sit in the browser and can’t hide themselves on a disk. However, as I told above, some pop-ups may promote malware to your system. It is nearly impossible to describe all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a bad idea. Thus, after removing the source of the pop-up advertisements it is recommended to use anti-malware software. I’d especially recommend that in the case when you have never allowed pop-up advertisements, but they still appeared. This situation may point at malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both system recovery and malware scanning and removal purposes, thanks to its system recovery functionality and superb detection system.

First and foremost, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to do in manual or automated way. 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 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:


# 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 Softsolution.me 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 Softsolution.me Pop-ups?

Name: Softsolution.me

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