Remove Towerfriend1 Pop-up Virus — How to Remove?

Towerfriend1 pop-up notices can appear out of the blue, covering the material of the page you visited or opening your web browser when you don’t wish it to be opened.

Clicking the Towerfriend1 advertisement can result in the injection of different malware or unwanted programs. In this post, you will see the tutorial of Towerfriend1 popups removal in various manners, and also examining your computer for additional malware existence.

What are Towerfriend1 pop-ups?

Towerfriend1 popups are an effect of adware presence. Adware is a type of malware that suggests you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click promotions, which produces a major amount of income for adware representatives. These ads might have sometimes shocking material, or have a link to harmful content/website, since adware maintainers have no purpose to check the goodness of the content they are going to reveal – their single target is cash.

Towerfriend1 push notification

Towerfriend1 push notification.

Pop-up promotions itself is an excellent, affordable and really efficient advertising instrument1. It enables the seller to attach the customers’ attention to their website, as well as the buyers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they intend to buy. When the person will get a pop-up notification that the TV set he desires to purchase is provided at the online shop he/she saw earlier with a 15% discount, one will undoubtedly use this chance and purchase it. Taking into consideration the extremely low cost for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising tool is a much-loved thing among the marketing departments of big online sellers.

However, such a rewarding scheme could not be missed by virus creators. Ability to demonstrate the popup advertisements forcibly to the targets of malware invasion is a great basis for evil-minded tricks with the popup promotions. And Towerfriend1.xyz promotions is just one of hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a short info for the Towerfriend1 site
Site Towerfriend1.xyz
Hosting AS15317 Serverel Inc.
United States, San Jose
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 173.214.240.15
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior Www, Ligamedia, Executivej
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Towerfriend1 virus?

There are a lot of ways of becoming infected by the adware that trigger the Towerfriend1 popups tornado. A lion’s part of this virus incidents is after the free software or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Freeware can also be downloaded from the official website, and the adware is provided as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A huge amount of people oftentimes utilize the unreliable programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, various apps that are free of cost, or even hacked programs. All of these kinds of applications are risky, due to the fact that it is very easy to include a Towerfriend1 malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

People dislike popups

The statistic shows that people dislike popup advertising more than other types of promotions

How can I get rid of Towerfriend1 pop-up advertisements?

The manual of Towerfriend1 adware elimination contains 2 sections. Initially, we need to deal with the malware, and after that take care of the results of its activity. The elimination procedure is really easy, because it may be executed even with the use of Microsoft Defender – security tool that is present on all computers with Windows 8/10. However, due to its large resources usage, as well as some defects that may be serious for some groups of individuals, Defender is oftentimes disabled by the users, so its utilization is most likely impossible. What’s more, various trojan viruses have the ability to shut off the embedded antivirus. It is much better to use the separated program that will not have such exposures.

    Gridinsoft Anti-Malware during the scan process
  • Standard scan checks the logical disk where the system files are stored, together with the files of programs you have already installed. The scan lasts up to 6 minutes.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware scan results
  • When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Towerfriend1 malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware - After Cleaning

Reset browser settings to default

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 web browsers are reset, you need to make sure that your browser will definitely be connected the accurate DNS while connecting to the web page you want. Make a text file titled “hosts” on your computer’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following content3:

# 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.

Nonetheless, there is one trouble that makes the things much harder to restore, especially without the anti-malware software. The majority of adware versions that are utilized to show you the Towerfriend1 pop-up promotions are modifying the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to change your browser settings after your computer was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly crash soon. Sometimes, you will see no crash, however, large lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 seconds, and after that it will be back to the normal, till you attempt to open settings once again.

References

  1. More about pop-up advertisements on Wikipedia.
  2. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.

About the author

Wilbur Woodham

Technical writer covering malware detections, unwanted programs, and browser-based threats. Wilbur turns research notes into step-by-step guides that Windows users can follow safely.

Leave a Comment