How to remove Soulmedia pop-ups? — Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Soulmedia pop-up notifications can appear unexpectedly, covering the material of the website you checked or opening your web browser when you don’t desire it to be opened.

Clicking on the Soulmedia advertisement can cause the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the guideline of Soulmedia popups removal in multiple methods, as well as inspecting your system for extra malware presence.

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What are Soulmedia pop-ups?

Soulmedia popups are a consequence of adware action. Adware is a kind of malware that suggests you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click advertisements, which generates a massive amount of profit for adware suppliers. These advertisements might consist of explicit composition, or have a link to malicious content/website, since adware maintainers have no purpose to inspect the goodness of the material they are going to reveal – their solitary target is money.

Soulmedia push notification

Soulmedia push notification.

Pop-up promotions itself is an excellent, cheap and really effective advertising instrument1. It allows the seller to link the buyers’ interest to their website, and the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they wish to purchase. When the person will get a pop-up alert that the TV set he likes to buy is offered at the online shop he/she visited previously with a 15% price cut, one will undoubtedly use this opportunity and purchase it. Considering the incredibly low price for the popups and their targeting, such a marketing method is a favourite thing amongst the advertising departments of huge online retailers.

However, such a rewarding strategy could not be missed by virus developers. Ability to show the popup ads by force to the targets of malware invasion is a great basis for malicious tricks with the popup advertisements. And Soulmedia.xyz promotions is among hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a short info for the Soulmedia
Site Soulmedia.xyz
Hosting AS14061 DigitalOcean, LLC
Netherlands, Amsterdam
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 178.62.225.201
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior Greatested, Misrepress, Gamesprofessor1
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Soulmedia virus?

There are a lot of methods of getting contaminated by the adware that result in the Soulmedia popups tornado. A lion’s part of this computer virus incidents is after the free software or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Free software may likewise be downloaded from the main website, and the adware is provided as a legit bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A lot of individuals often use the uncertain programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, various tools that are free of cost, or perhaps hacked programs. All of these kinds of software are dangerous, because it is extremely simple to build in a Soulmedia malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Soulmedia popup malware can also be concealed in the ad somewhere on the strange site. Such websites are typically filled with intense and blinking ads, and their owners typically accept any promotions to be posted on their page. Therefore, clicking such banners is a shot in the dark: only the ad provider realizes what will happen when you press this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or unwanted programs, you can additionally receive something a lot more unsafe, like ransomware or coin miner; the large share of coin miners circulation is exactly after the malicious ads.

People dislike popups

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

Potentially unwanted programs, like Soulmedia pop-up virus may provoke a wide range of different troubles on your computer. Distracting is not the only problem – pop-ups may present you the banners, where you are offered to download one more unknown application, or “a effective anti-malware tool”. Scareware is usually distributed with the last slogun. Potentially undesirable applications, in turn, may have spyware functionality. And it is quite hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a good one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related promotions are also exploited as a spreading method by various trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such viruses is 100% unwanted, and can cost you several hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not interacting with these advertisements, they can be clicked by whoever who also uses your PC – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the things can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to deal with it without data and money loss. It is recommended to get rid of the viruses with anti-malware applications as soon as possible.

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

The tutorial of Soulmedia adware elimination includes 2 parts. First, we need to eliminate the malware, and then fix the effects of its action. The removal process is very simple, because it may be executed even with using Microsoft Defender – anti-malware software that is present on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. Nonetheless, due to its substantial resources consumption, as well as some errors that may be serious for some groups of individuals, Defender is often turned off by the users, so its usage is probably impossible. In addition, different trojan viruses are able to disable the embedded antivirus. It is better to use the separated program that will not have such exposures.

I’d advise you to use Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven security tool that will definitely wipe out the viruses from your system and also create an impenetrable cover with a Proactive protection function. However, let’s handle Soulmedia adware initially.

Removing Soulmedia 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 Soulmedia 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 browser will connect the accurate DNS while connecting to the website you want. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following content3:

# 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.

However, there is one trouble that makes the things a lot harder to restore, specifically without the anti-malware program. A lot of adware variations that are used to show you the Soulmedia pop-up advertisements are adjusting the deep browser settings, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to fix your browser settings after your machine was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly crash soon. Sometimes, you will see no crash, however, large lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 secs, and afterwards it will be back to the normal, up until you try 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.

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 Soulmedia Pop-ups?

Name: Soulmedia

Description: Soulmedia - 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 Soulmedia.xyz push notifications?” or “why do Soulmedia.xyz pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Soulmedia 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 the reasons why I suggest it for malware elimination.
  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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