Remove TotAdBlock Pop-up Ads — How to Fix Gude

Written by Wilbur Woodham
TotAdBlock push notifications appear out of the blue, distracting and annoying you. Nonetheless, they are way more than just notifications – their essence is clearly malicious, and they can bring other malicious stuff to your system. In this article, I will show you how to remove TotAdBlock pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with TotAdBlock pop-up advertisements will be useless at best. At worst, the pages it can open can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements may also advertise fake online 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 TotAdBlock 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 advertisements and TotAdBlock pop-ups is the malignant origins of the latter. Common pop-up ads are offered for you to enable on different sites with a straightforward purpose – notify you about the latest articles, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful tool to help your site to retain visitors and help the interested visitors to have the best price.

Brief summary of the Totadblock.com pop-up ads:
NameTotadblock.com
HostingAS50245 Serverel Inc.
Netherlands, Amsterdam
IP Address109.206.168.16
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorTydevelelasti, Bioxe, Tesirg
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

TotAdBlock pop-up advertisements, as opposed, are related to unlegit websites. You will generally observe the proposition to turn them on after a redirection from another page. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless it throws you into such a dubious place. In this case, turning on pop-up ads is offered as the anti-bot filtering. Alternatively, the web pages can refuse to show you the contents unless you turn on these pop-up notifications. These demands should be the red flag, as websites generally have a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing such an offer is a reason to leave the site doubtlessly. Sometimes, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not get to the website – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-ups.

TotAdBlock push notification

TotAdBlock push notification.

How does it work?

The majority of browsers support turning on push notifications from websites. Sites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content they want. It can be an advertisement of the product listed on this website, or a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you can see the push notification from site X, but clicking it will redirect you to site Y – because a referral link to that website was added.

Cyber burglars rely on this ability in their attempt to earn money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing the pop-ups, and then just spread hundreds of banners of other crooks they contract with. As you may suppose, no legit organisations will have a deal with fraudsters. All the TotAdBlock notifications you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. In some cases, the same user may get into a trap of multiple pop-up spamming websites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a miserable commission for one person, but when you can send ads to hundreds of victims and make it hundreds of times each day – that is a much more significant sum. Despite most of such banners giving no result at all, it may still give all the parties a lot of money.

Are TotAdBlock pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look harmless – just a blinking pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you generally see in pop-up advertisements. Totadblock.com web page is controlled by crooks, who deliberately throw hundreds of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any common sense and can make sporadic pop-up advertisements into a hurricane of banners. For weak computers, that may be enough to make the system slower. But troubles are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing related to illegal advertising, TotAdBlock pop-up advertisements don’t have legit deals to offer. Even when crooks make the banners looking similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the web page 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 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, TotAdBlock 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 TotAdBlock pop-ups?

Fortunately, TotAdBlock pop-up ads removal is pretty easy. They parasite in the web browser and cannot hide themselves on a disk. Nonetheless, as I stated before, some push notifications can deliver malicious software to your computer. It is nearly impossible to describe all cases, and manual malware removal is a poor idea. Thus, after getting rid of the pop-up advertisements it is recommended to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended in the case when you have never allowed pop-ups, but they still appeared. This situation can point at malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both system recovery and malware scanning and removal purposes, thanks to 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 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 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 TotAdBlock 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 TotAdBlock Pop-ups?

Name: TotAdBlock

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