Thescads Ads Removal Guide — Fix Push Notification

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Thescads pop-up advertisements appear out of the blue, distracting and annoying you. Still, that is slightly more than annoying pop-ups – their origins is cleanly malignant, and they may bring other malicious stuff to your computer. In this article, I will show you how to remove Thescads pop-up notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Thescads pop-ups will be useless at best. At worst, the web pages it can show you can introduce malware to your system. These push notifications can also advertise fake shopping sites 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 Thescads 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 notifications and Thescads notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal push notifications are offered for you to enable on different sites with a understandable purpose – keep you aware about the fresh publications, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful thing to help your website to retain visitors and help the interested users to have the best price.

Short summary of the Thescads.com pop-up ads:
NameThescads.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address172.67.176.182
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorRocklightstep, Rockblackstep, Read
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Thescads pop-up notifications, in contrast, have a deal with untrustworthy websites. You will generally observe the offer to turn them on after a redirection from another page. Redirects are OK unless it throws you to such a questionable place. At that point, enabling pop-up ads is offered as the anti-bot check-up. In other cases, the sites can deny showing you the content unless you turn on these pop-up advertisements. These requirements should already raise suspicion, as websites generally feature a different anti-bot mechanism. Spectating this demand is a reason to close the site right away. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not see the web page – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-ups.

Thescads push notification

Thescads push notification.

How does it work?

Most of browsers support turning on pop-ups from sites. Websites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content they like. It may be an advertisement of the product or a page listed on this website, or an ad of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but clicking it will redirect you to website Y – because a referral link to that website was embedded.

Cyber burglars bear on this feature in their approach to gain money through advertising. They trick users into allowing them to show the banners, and then just spread numerous ads of anyone they have a deal with. As you may suppose, no benevolent organisations will have a business with fraudsters. All the Thescads notifications you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same user can get into a trap of several pop-up spamming web pages, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

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

Are Thescads pop-up ads dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they may look non-threatening – just a colourful pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the things this window promotes differ sharply from what you generally see in pop-up advertisements. Thescads.com web page is controlled by fraudsters, who intendedly throw tons of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any common sense and can make sporadic push notifications into a hurricane of promotions. For weak computers, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all problems these pop-up advertisements carry.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing related to illegal ads, Thescads pop-ups do not contain any legit offers. Even when hackers make the ads similar to ones from well-known retailers, the site these ads 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-ups 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, Thescads 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 Thescads pop-ups?

Fortunately, Thescads push notifications removal is pretty easy. They reside in the browser and can’t hide themselves in the system. However, as I stated above, some pop-ups may introduce malware to your system. It is nearly impossible to show all of the cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a bad idea. Therefore, after disabling the push notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. I’d especially recommend that if you have never clicked “Allow” to push notifications, and they still appeared. This situation can point at malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware checkup purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and superb detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in both manual and automatic manner. The former, obviously, requires more time to complete and may 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 can 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 website 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 Thescads 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 Thescads Pop-ups?

Name: Thescads

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