Remove Sweepstakessurveytoday Pop-up Virus — How to Remove?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Sweepstakessurveytoday pop-up alerts can appear unexpectedly, covering the post of the page you checked or opening your web browser when you don’t need it to be opened.

Clicking the Sweepstakessurveytoday advertisement can result in the injection of other malware or unwanted programs. In this guide, you will see the tutorial of Sweepstakessurveytoday popups removal in several methods, as well as inspecting your computer for other viruses presence.

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What are Sweepstakessurveytoday pop-ups?

Sweepstakessurveytoday popups are an effect of adware activity. Adware is a type of malware that shows you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which creates a significant amount of revenue for adware representatives. These ads may contain sometimes shocking information, or have a web link to malicious content/website, because adware maintainers have no reason to examine the goodness of the content they are going to reveal – their solitary target is cash.

Sweepstakessurveytoday push notification

Sweepstakessurveytoday push notification.

Pop-up advertising itself is a good, low-priced and also extremely effective marketing solution1. It permits the vendor to link the customers’ attention to their website, as well as the buyers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they intend to purchase. When the customer will receive a pop-up notification that the TV set he desires to purchase is provided at the online store he/she saw previously with a 15% price cut, one will surely use this opportunity and get it. Considering the very low price for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising method is a favourite thing amongst the advertising departments of big internet retail stores.

Nevertheless, such a rewarding system could not be missed by malware developers. Ability to demonstrate the popup advertisements by force to the victims of malware invasion is a perfect basis for malevolent tricks with the popup ads. And Sweepstakessurveytoday.com ads is among hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a short info for the Sweepstakessurveytoday
SiteSweepstakessurveytoday.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
Infection TypeAdware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address188.114.97.3
SymptomsAnnoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behaviorDevice, Digitalfitsoft, Dgopx
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Sweepstakessurveytoday virus?

There are a lot of ways of becoming contaminated by the adware that trigger the Sweepstakessurveytoday popups tornado. A lion’s part of this malware instances is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Free software may also be downloaded from the main web page, and the adware is offered as a legit bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A plenty of people regularly use the dubious programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, various utilities that are free of cost, or perhaps hacked programs. Every one of these sorts of applications are dangerous, due to the fact that it is extremely simple to build in a Sweepstakessurveytoday malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Sweepstakessurveytoday popup malware can also be hidden in the advertisement somewhere on the odd website. Such web pages are in most cases filled with colorful and blinking ads, and their proprietors generally accept any type of promos to be posted on their page. For this reason, clicking such banners is a risky thing: only the advertisement contractor realizes what will occur when you click this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or unwanted programs, you may also get something much more damaging, 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 programs, like Sweepstakessurveytoday popup virus may provoke a wide range of troubles on your PC. Distracting is not the only problem – pop-ups may display you the advertisements, where you are offered to get one more strange application, or “a amazing anti-malware tool”. Scareware is usually distributed with the last motto. Potentially undesirable applications, in turn, can have spyware functionality. And it is very hard to distinguish the undesirable app from a good one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related advertisements are also exploited as a distribution way by different trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such viruses is 100% unwanted, and can cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And even if you are not tapping these advertisements, they may be clicked by someone who also uses your PC – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the things can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without data and money loss. It is recommended to wipe out the viruses with anti-malware programs as soon as possible.

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

The guide of Sweepstakessurveytoday adware removal includes 2 sections. Initially, we need to remove the malware, and afterwards deal with the effects of its action. The elimination procedure is pretty simple, since it can be executed even with using Microsoft Defender – security program that is present on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, because of its huge resources consumption, as well as some failures that may be pivotal for some categories of users, Defender is frequently turned off by the users, so its use is probably impossible. Additionally, a variety of trojan viruses are able to disable the embedded antivirus. It is far better to make use of the separated program that will not have such exposures.

I would certainly advise you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven antivirus tool that will definitely eliminate the viruses from your computer and create an invulnerable cover with a Proactive protection function. But let’s deal with Sweepstakessurveytoday adware first.

Removing Sweepstakessurveytoday 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 Sweepstakessurveytoday 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 ensure that your web browser will connect the right DNS while connecting to the web page you want. Create a text file named “hosts” on your desktop, then 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.

Nonetheless, there is one trouble that makes things a lot harder to restore, especially without the anti-malware software. Most of adware versions that are utilized to show you the Sweepstakessurveytoday pop-up promotions are modifying the deep browser setups, 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 collapse quickly. Sometimes, you will see no crash, but huge lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 secs, and then it will be back to the normal, till you try to open settings once more.

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 Sweepstakessurveytoday Pop-ups?

Name: Sweepstakessurveytoday

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