Top-search.xyz Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Top-search.xyz push notifications appear when you do not expect, bothering and irritating you. However, that is way more than annoying notifications – their nature is cleanly malicious, and they may introduce other malicious stuff to your computer. In this post, I will show you the guide how to remove Top-search.xyz pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Top-search.xyz pop-up advertisements will be ineffective at best. At worst, the sites it can throw you to can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements can also promote 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 Top-search.xyz pop-up 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 ads and Top-search.xyz notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal pop-up advertisements are offered for you to enable on different sites with a straightforward purpose – keep you aware about the fresh posts, discounts and so on. It is a useful tool to help your site to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested ones to have the best price.

Brief summary of the Top-search.xyz pop-ups:
NameTop-search.xyz
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 behavior2coin, Popirs, News
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Top-search.xyz pop-up ads, in contrast, are related to less legit sites. You will commonly witness the offer to enable them following the redirection from another website. Redirects are OK unless they throw you into such a questionable place. At that point, turning on pop-ups is offered under the guise of the anti-DDoS check. Alternatively, the sites can deny showing you the contents unless you turn on these pop-up ads. These requirements should already be the red flag, as sites usually feature a different anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing this requirement should be the reason to skip the website doubtlessly. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the web page – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-ups.

Top-search.xyz push notification

Top-search.xyz push notification.

How does this work?

The majority of web browsers support enabling pop-ups from websites. Sites, on the other hand, can send out notifications with the content they want. It can be a promotion of the page published on this website, or an ad of their partner page. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but clicking it will direct you to site Y – because a link to that website was built in.

Cyber burglars bear on this ability in their approach to gain money using illegal advertising. They trick victims into allowing the pop-ups, and then just spread numerous ads of anyone they have a deal with. As you can suppose, no image-caring companies will contract with fraudsters. All the Top-search.xyz push ads you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. At some point, the same victim can be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming websites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The ads these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It generally provides a negligible payment for one person, but when you have a huge number of users and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a much more significant sum. Despite most of these ads giving no result at all, it may still give all the participants a lot of profit.

Are Top-search.xyz pop-ups dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they may look safe – just a blinking window that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you used to see in pop-ups. Top-search.xyz web page is controlled by crooks, who deliberately spread tons of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic pop-ups into a storm of promotions. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But problems are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing that touches illegal ads, Top-search.xyz pop-up advertisements don’t have legit offers. Even though crooks make the ads similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the web page 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 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, Top-search.xyz pop-up advertisements are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Top-search.xyz pop-ups?

Fortunately, Top-search.xyz pop-ups removal is not very complicated. They reside in the web browser and can’t hide themselves on a disk. Nevertheless, as I pointed out before, some pop-up notifications may promote 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 pop-up advertisements the best option is to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that in the case when you have never allowed pop-ups, but they still appeared. This situation may point at malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware removal purposes, thanks to its abilities of system recovery and advanced detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in both manual and automatic manner. 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 site 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 Top-search.xyz 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 Top-search.xyz Pop-ups?

Name: Top-search.xyz

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