Remove Uidtime Virus — How to Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Uidtime pop-up advertisements appear when you do not expect, disturbing and irritating you. However, that is much more than annoying notifications – their origins is surely malicious, and they can bring other malicious stuff to your system. In this post, I will guide you on how to remove Uidtime pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Uidtime push notifications will be ineffective at best. At worst, the sites it can throw you to can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up notifications 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 Uidtime 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 pop-up advertisements and Uidtime pop-ups is the malignant origins of the latter. Common pop-up ads are offered for you to enable with a legitimate purpose – notify you about the new articles, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful thing to help your website to retain visitors and help the interested ones to have the best price.

Short summary of the Uidtime.com pop-ups:
NameUidtime.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address172.67.138.113
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorEasylifescan, News, Goghoordsurvey
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Uidtime pop-up notifications, in contrast, have a deal with untrustworthy sites. You will generally observe the offer to enable them following the redirection from another site. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless they throw you into such a questionable place. At that point, enabling push notifications is served under the guise of the anti-bot filtering. In other cases, the sites may refuse to show you the content unless you apply these push notifications. These demands should be the red flag, as websites generally have a different anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing this offer is a reason to skip the website doubtlessly. Sometimes, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the website – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up ads.

Uidtime push notification

Uidtime push notification.

How does this work?

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

Cybercriminals rely on this ability in their attempt to gain money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing them to show the banners, and then just spread hundreds of banners of other crooks they have a deal with. As you can suppose, no benevolent organisations will contract with fraudsters. All the Uidtime popups you may see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same victim may get into a trap of multiple pop-up spamming websites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a negligible commission for one person, but when you can send ads to a huge number of victims and make it hundreds of times 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 parties a lot of money.

Are Uidtime push notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they may look safe – just a colourful pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you generally see in push notifications. Uidtime.com web page is controlled by fraudsters, who deliberately show hundreds and thousands of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic pop-up ads into a hurricane of banners. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all problems these pop-up notifications carry.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing that touches illegal advertising, Uidtime pop-ups lack legit deals to offer. Even though hackers make the ads looking similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the site 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 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, Uidtime 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 Uidtime pop-ups?

Fortunately, Uidtime pop-up ads removal is pretty easy. They sit in the web browser and can’t hide themselves on a disk. Nonetheless, as I told above, some pop-up notifications may deliver malicious programs to your system. It is hard to predict all of the cases, and manual malware removal is inconvenient. Thus, after getting rid of the push notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that if you have never allowed pop-up notifications, but they still appeared. That can point at adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both system recovery and malware scanning and removal purposes, thanks to its system recovery functionality and advanced detection system.

Initially, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to accomplish 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 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 Uidtime 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 Uidtime Pop-ups?

Name: Uidtime

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