Remove Starthotdating.life Pop-up Ads — How to Fix Gude

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Starthotdating.life pop-up alerts can appear unexpectedly, covering the material of the website you went to or opening your browser when you do not want it to be opened.

Clicking on the Starthotdating.life promotion may trigger the injection of different malware or unwanted programs. In this guide, you will see the manual of Starthotdating.life popups removal in several manners, as well as checking your system for additional viruses presence.

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What are Starthotdating.life pop-ups?

Starthotdating.life popups are an effect of adware activity. Adware is a sort of malware that presents you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which generates a large volume of revenue for adware suppliers. These promotions may have sometimes shocking information, or have a web link to malicious content/website, due to the fact that adware maintainers have no purpose to inspect the goodness of the material they are going to show – their solitary target is money.

Starthotdating.life push notification

Starthotdating.life push notification.

Pop-up promotions itself is a good, cheap and also very efficient advertising tool1. It permits the vendor to link the buyers’ attention to their site, as well as the buyers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they intend to buy. When the consumer will receive a pop-up notification that the TV set he wishes to purchase is available at the online shop he/she checked out earlier with a 15% discount, one will definitely use this possibility and get it. Considering the very small cost for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising method is a favorite thing among the advertising teams of large online retail stores.

Nevertheless, such a profitable strategy could not be missed by virus developers. Potential to demonstrate the popup advertisements forcibly to the people of malware attack is a perfect basis for malevolent adjustments with the popup advertisements. And Starthotdating.life ads is just one of hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a short info for the Starthotdating.life site
SiteStarthotdating.life
HostingAS24940 Hetzner Online GmbH
Germany, Berlin
Infection TypeAdware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address195.201.93.6
SymptomsAnnoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behaviorSrchtravel, Search, Protection
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Starthotdating.life virus?

There are a number of ways of becoming infected by the adware that create the Starthotdating.life popups tornado. A lion’s part of this virus instances is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Free software may also be downloaded from the main website, and the adware is offered as a legitimate bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A huge amount of users oftentimes use the uncertain programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, a wide range of apps that are free of cost, and even hacked programs. All of these sorts of software are risky, due to the fact that it is extremely easy to include a Starthotdating.life malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

Starthotdating.life popup malware may likewise be hidden in the advertisement somewhere on the odd website. Such websites are usually full of colorful and blinking ads, and their proprietors usually approve any type of promos to be placed on their web page. For this reason, clicking on such banners is a risky thing: only the ad contractor knows what will occur when you press this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you can also get something much more damaging, like ransomware or coin miner; the large share of coin miners circulation is exactly after the malicious promotions.

People dislike popups

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

Potentially undesirable programs, like Starthotdating.life pop-up virus may initiate a wide range of troubles on your personal computer. Distracting is not the only problem – pop-ups may show you the ads, where you are offered to download one more unknown application, or “a effective anti-malware tool”. Scareware is often distributed with the use of the last slogun. Potentially undesirable applications, in turn, may have spyware functionality. And it is very hard to distinguish the undesirable app from a normal one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and fake antiviruses, popup-related banners are also exploited as a spreading method by different trojan viruses, for example – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such malware is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you several hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not tapping 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 antivirus applications as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Starthotdating.life pop-up advertisements?

The guide of Starthotdating.life adware removal contains 2 sections. First, we need to deal with the malware, and afterwards repair the effects of its activity. The elimination procedure is very easy, because it may be done even with the use of Microsoft Defender – anti-virus tool that is available on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, as a result of its significant resources usage, as well as some defects that may be pivotal for some types of users, Defender is often turned off by the users, so its use is most likely impossible. In addition, a wide range of trojan viruses are able to turn off the embedded antivirus. It is much better to make use of the separated program that will not have such weakness.

I’d suggest you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven anti-malware tool that will surely wipe out the viruses from your PC and also create an impenetrable shield with a Proactive protection function. But let’s take care of Starthotdating.life adware first.

Removing Starthotdating.life 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 Starthotdating.life 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 browsers are reset, you need to make sure that your web browser will definitely be connected the appropriate DNS while connecting to the website you need. Make a text file titled “hosts” on your computer’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following lines3:

# 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 problem that makes the things a lot harder to repair, specifically without the anti-malware software. A lot of adware variations that are used to show you the Starthotdating.life pop-up ads are altering the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to change your browser settings after your PC was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly collapse soon. In some cases, you will see no crash, however, huge lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 secs, and after that it will be back to the normal, up 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 Starthotdating.life Pop-ups?

Name: Starthotdating.life

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