How to remove Tunnelbuilder.top pop-ups? — Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Tunnelbuilder.top push notifications appear out of the blue, disturbing and annoying you. Nonetheless, they are much more than just notifications – their essence is purely malicious, and they may bring other malware to your system. In this article, I will show you the guide how to remove Tunnelbuilder.top push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Tunnelbuilder.top push notifications will be ineffective at best. At worst, the sites it can open may introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups may also advertise 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 Tunnelbuilder.top 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 advertisements and Tunnelbuilder.top notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Common push notifications are offered for you to enable on different sites with a legitimate purpose – notify you about the fresh posts, discounts and so on. It is a useful thing to help your website to keep visitors and help the interested users to have the best price.

Brief description of the Tunnelbuilder.top pop-up ads:
NameTunnelbuilder.top
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address104.21.22.198
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorTorimg, Torclomil, Redlabelsky
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Tunnelbuilder.top pop-up ads, as opposed, have a deal with unlegit websites. You will generally witness the proposition to turn them on following the redirection from another website. Redirects are OK unless they throw you to such a dubious place. At that point, enabling pop-up advertisements is offered under the guise of the anti-bot check-up. Alternatively, the websites may deny showing you the contents unless you apply these push notifications. These demands should be the red flag, as websites commonly feature a different anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing such an requirement is a reason to close the page 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.

Tunnelbuilder.top push notification

Tunnelbuilder.top push notification.

How does it work?

The majority of browsers support enabling pop-ups from sites. Sites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content they like. It can be a promotion of the product listed for sale on this particular site, as well as 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 the latter was embedded.

Scoundrels bear on this ability in their attempt to earn money through advertising. They trick users into turning on pop-ups, and after that just spread hundreds of banners of other crooks they have a deal with. As you can suppose, no image-caring organisations will have a business with fraudsters. All the Tunnelbuilder.top popups you may see lead to other untrustworthy sites. At some point, the same user can be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming sites, 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 payment for one viewer, but when you can send ads to hundreds of victims and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a much bigger sum. Despite the majority of these ads giving no result at all, it may still bring all the participants a lot of money.

Are Tunnelbuilder.top pop-up notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they can look harmless – just a colourful pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you used to see in push notifications. Tunnelbuilder.top site is ruled by fraudsters, who deliberately throw tons of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic pop-up notifications into a hurricane of banners. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But troubles are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing related to illegal advertising, Tunnelbuilder.top pop-up advertisements lack legit deals to offer. Even when crooks make the ads similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the website these banners 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 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, Tunnelbuilder.top pop-up notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Tunnelbuilder.top pop-ups?

Fortunately, Tunnelbuilder.top pop-up advertisements removal is not very complicated. They sit in the browser and can’t hide themselves on a disk. Nonetheless, as I pointed out before, some pop-up advertisements can promote malicious programs to your system. It is nearly impossible to describe all of the cases, and manual malware removal is a poor idea. Therefore, after disabling the pop-ups it is recommended to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended if you have never allowed pop-up advertisements, and they still appeared. That can point at malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both system recovery and malware scanning purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and advanced detection system.

First of all, 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 Tunnelbuilder.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 Tunnelbuilder.top Pop-ups?

Name: Tunnelbuilder.top

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