Thunderforge.top Ads Removal Guide — Fix Push Notification

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Thunderforge.top pop-up advertisements appear when you do not expect, distracting and annoying you. Nonetheless, that is way more than simple pop-ups – their nature is clearly malignant, and they can install other malware to your device. In this post, I will show you the guide how to remove Thunderforge.top pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Thunderforge.top pop-up advertisements will be ineffective at best. In worst case scenario, the web pages it can open may introduce malware to your system. These pop-up notifications may also promote fake 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 Thunderforge.top pop-ups?

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 Thunderforge.top notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Common pop-up ads are offered for you to enable on different sites with a straightforward purpose – keep you aware about the fresh publications, discounts and so on. It is a useful thing to help your website to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested visitors to have the best deal.

Short summary of the Thunderforge.top pop-up ads:
NameThunderforge.top
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address172.64.136.20
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorBushbunshot, Epededonemil, Prizehubtop
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Thunderforge.top push notifications, as opposed, have a deal with untrustworthy sites. You will commonly see the offer to enable them following the redirection from another page. Redirects are OK unless they throw you to such a questionable place. In this case, turning on pop-ups is served under the guise of the anti-bot check. In other cases, the web pages may refuse to show you the content unless you turn on these pop-up ads. These demands should already be the red flag, as sites generally feature a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Seeing this offer should be the reason to close the page right away. Sometimes, 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-up ads.

Thunderforge.top push notification

Thunderforge.top push notification.

How does it work?

Most of web browsers support enabling push notifications from websites. Sites, on the other hand, may send notifications with the content they want. It can be an advertisement of the product published on this site, as well as an ad of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but clicking it will direct you to website Y – because a referral link to the latter was built in.

Cybercriminals bear on this feature in their attempt to gain money using illegal advertising. They trick users into allowing them to show the banners, and after that just spread numerous ads of anyone they have a deal with. As you may suppose, no normal organisations will have a business with fraudsters. All the Thunderforge.top push ads you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same user may be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming web pages, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The ads these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a miserable commission for one viewer, but when you have hundreds of users and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a way bigger sum. Despite the majority of such banners are ineffective, it can still bring all the parties a lot of profit.

Are Thunderforge.top push notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they may look safe – just a blinking pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-ups. Thunderforge.top site is ruled by crooks, who deliberately spread hundreds and thousands of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can launch sporadic pop-up ads into a storm of promotions. For weak computers, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all troubles these pop-up ads carry.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing that touches illegal advertising, Thunderforge.top pop-up ads lack legit offers. Even when hackers make the ads looking similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the site these banners 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-up notifications 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, Thunderforge.top pop-ups are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Thunderforge.top pop-ups?

Fortunately, Thunderforge.top pop-ups removal is not very complicated. They sit in the browser and can’t conceal themselves on a disk. However, as I pointed out before, some pop-up advertisements can promote malicious software to your system. It is hard to show all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is inconvenient. Thus, after removing the source of the pop-up advertisements it is recommended to use anti-malware software. That is especially recommended if you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up notifications, but they still appeared. This situation may be a sign of malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both system recovery and malware scanning purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and multi-component detection system.

Initially, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in manual or automated way. The former, obviously, takes 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 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 Thunderforge.top 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 Thunderforge.top Pop-ups?

Name: Thunderforge.top

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