Remove Theoverheat Pop-up Virus — How to Remove?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Theoverheat pop-ups appear out of the blue, disturbing and annoying you. Nonetheless, they are slightly more than annoying notifications – their nature is surely malicious, and they can install other malicious stuff to your device. In this post, I will show you the guide how to remove Theoverheat pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Theoverheat push notifications will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the websites it can show you can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements may also promote 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 Theoverheat 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-up advertisements and Theoverheat pop-ups is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal pop-up notifications are offered for you to enable with a legitimate purpose – notify you about the fresh posts, discounts and so on. It is an effective approach to help your site to keep visitors and help the interested ones to have the best deal.

Short summary of the Theoverheat.com pop-ups:
NameTheoverheat.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address188.114.97.3
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorGerpins, Getadvnp, Nonils
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Theoverheat push notifications, as opposed, are related to unlegit websites. You will commonly witness the offer to turn them on following the redirection from another website. It’s OK to see redirects unless they throw you to such a dubious place. At that point, enabling pop-up ads is offered under the guise of the anti-DDoS filtering. In other cases, the websites can refuse to show you the contents unless you turn on these pop-up notifications. These demands should raise suspicion, as websites usually feature a different anti-bot mechanism. Spectating such an demand should be the reason to close the website right away. Sometimes, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not get to the site – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the push notifications.

Theoverheat push notification

Theoverheat push notification.

How does it work?

The vast majority of browsers support turning on push notifications from sites. Websites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content they like. It can be a promotion of the product posted on this site, or a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you can see the pop-up from site X, but clicking it will throw you to site Y – because a link to the latter was embedded.

Crooks rely on this ability in their approach to gain money through advertising. They trick users into turning on pop-ups, and then just spread hundreds of promotions of other crooks they have a deal with. As you may suppose, no normal companies will contract with fraudsters. All the Theoverheat popups you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same user may get into a trap of several pop-up spamming web pages, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The ads these rascals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a miserable payment for one viewer, but when you can send ads to a huge number of users and show them hundreds of ads every day – that is a much more significant sum. Even though most of such ads are ineffective, it can still give all the participants a lot of money.

Are Theoverheat pop-up ads dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they can look non-threatening – just a colourful pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you generally see in pop-up advertisements. Theoverheat.com site is ruled by fraudsters, who intentionally throw hundreds of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic pop-up notifications into a hurricane of banners. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all problems these pop-ups carry.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing related to illegal advertising, Theoverheat pop-up ads lack legit offers. Even though hackers make the ads looking similar to ones from well-known retailers, the site these ads will throw you to are completely different. And these pages may 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, Theoverheat pop-up ads are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Theoverheat pop-ups?

Fortunately, Theoverheat pop-up advertisements removal is not very complicated. They reside in the browser and cannot hide themselves on a disk. However, as I pointed out before, some pop-up ads may deliver malicious software to your computer. It is hard to show all of the cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a bad idea. For that reason, after disabling the pop-up ads the best option is to use anti-malware software. That is especially recommended if you have never allowed pop-up advertisements, and they still appeared. That can point at malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware scanning and removal purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and advanced detection system.

Initially, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to do in manual or automated way. The former, obviously, takes 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 Theoverheat 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 Theoverheat Pop-ups?

Name: Theoverheat

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