How to remove Tratbc pop-ups? — Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Tratbc push notifications appear out of the blue, disturbing and annoying you. However, they are slightly more than annoying pop-ups – their nature is cleanly malicious, and they can install other malware to your system. In this post, I will show you the guide how to remove Tratbc pop-up notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Tratbc pop-up notifications will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the websites it can show you may introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements can also advertise fake online 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 Tratbc 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 push notifications and Tratbc pop-ups 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 new publications, discounts and so on. It is a useful thing to help your site to keep visitors and help the interested visitors to have the best price.

Short summary of the Tratbc.com pop-ups:
NameTratbc.com
HostingAS14061 DigitalOcean, LLC
Netherlands, Amsterdam
IP Address138.68.123.185
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorShorturl, Nongloths, Fast
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Tratbc pop-up advertisements, in contrast, are related to untrustworthy web pages. You will generally observe the offer to turn them on following the redirection from another page. It’s OK to see redirects unless it throws you to such a questionable place. In this case, turning on push notifications is offered under the guise of the anti-bot filtering. Alternatively, the sites can refuse to show you the contents unless you apply these pop-up notifications. These demands should raise suspicion, as websites commonly feature a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Seeing this requirement should be the reason to leave the website right away. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the site – the sole page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up advertisements.

Tratbc push notification

Tratbc push notification.

How does this work?

The vast majority of browsers support turning on push notifications from websites. Websites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content they like. It can be a promotion of the page posted on this particular site, or a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you can see the pop-up from site X, but clicking it will direct you to website Y – because a link to that website was built in.

Cybercriminals bear on this ability in their approach to earn money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing them to show the banners, and after that just spread hundreds of promotions of other crooks they contract with. As you can suppose, no normal organisations will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Tratbc push ads you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. In some cases, the same user may be trapped by several pop-up spamming sites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The ads these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a negligible commission for one view, but when you have hundreds of users and make it hundreds of times 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 parties a lot of profit.

Are Tratbc 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 contents of this window differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-up notifications. Tratbc.com web page is ruled by fraudsters, who intentionally spread hundreds and thousands of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic pop-up advertisements into a storm of banners. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all problems these pop-up notifications carry.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing that touches illegal advertising, Tratbc pop-up ads don’t have legit offers. Even though hackers make the ads similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the web page 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 push 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, Tratbc push notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Tratbc pop-ups?

Fortunately, Tratbc pop-up notifications removal is pretty easy. They parasite in the web browser and cannot conceal themselves in the system. However, as I stated before, some push notifications may promote malware to your computer. It is hard to show all of the cases, and manual malware removal is a bad idea. Therefore, after removing the source of the pop-up advertisements the best option is to use anti-malware software. That is especially recommended in the case when you have never allowed pop-ups, and they still appeared. This situation may be a sign of malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both system recovery and malware scanning purposes, thanks to its system recovery functionality and advanced detection system.

First and foremost, 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 Tratbc 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 Tratbc Pop-ups?

Name: Tratbc

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