Vgsks pop-up advertisements appear out of the blue, detracting and annoying you. Still, they are slightly more than simple pop-ups – their essence is purely malicious, and they can install other malicious stuff to your device. In this article, I will guide you on how to remove Vgsks pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.
Any interaction with Vgsks pop-up advertisements will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the web pages it can throw you to may introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements may also advertise 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.
What are Vgsks 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 Vgsks pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Common pop-up advertisements are offered for you to enable with a legitimate purpose – keep you aware about the fresh posts, discounts and so on. It is an effective approach to help your website to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested users to have the best deal.
Brief summary of the Vgsksc.com pop-up ads:
Name | Vgsksc.com |
Hosting | AS39572 DataWeb Global Group B.V. Netherlands, Amsterdam |
IP Address | 185.56.234.205 |
Malware type | Adware1 |
Effect | Unwanted pop-up advertisements |
Hazard level | Medium |
Malware source | Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites |
Similar behavior | Birons, News, Pushsar |
Removal method | To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC |
Vgsks pop-ups, in contrast, have a deal with unlegit sites. You will commonly observe the proposition to turn them on following the redirection from another website. It’s OK to see redirects unless it throws you to such a dubious place. At that point, enabling pop-ups is offered as the anti-bot check-up. Alternatively, the websites may deny showing you the content unless you enable these pop-ups. These theses should raise suspicion, as sites commonly feature a different anti-bot mechanism. Spectating this demand should be the reason to skip the website right away. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not see the website – the sole page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up advertisements.
How does it work?
The majority of web browsers support enabling pop-ups from websites. Sites, on the other hand, can send out notifications with the content of their choice. It can be an advertisement of the product posted on this website, or an ad of their partner page. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but interacting with it will redirect you to site Y – because a link to that website was added.
Scoundrels rely on this ability in their attempt to gain money using illegal advertising. They trick users into allowing the pop-ups, and after that just spread numerous promotions of anyone they have a deal with. As you can suppose, no legit organisations will contract with fraudsters. All the Vgsks popups you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same user can be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming web pages, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.
The promotions these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It generally provides a miserable payment for one person, but when you can send ads to a huge number of victims and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a way bigger sum. Even though the majority of these ads giving no result at all, it may still bring all the parties a lot of money.
Are Vgsks pop-up notifications dangerous?
Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look harmless – just a blinking window that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the things this window promotes differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-ups. Vgsksc.com web page is controlled by crooks, who intendedly spread hundreds of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can make sporadic pop-up advertisements into a hurricane of promotions. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But problems are not over at this point.
As with any other thing related to illegal advertising, Vgsks pop-ups don’t have legit offers. Even though crooks make the ads similar to ones from well-known retailers, the website 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, Vgsks push notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.
How to remove Vgsks pop-ups?
Fortunately, Vgsks pop-up advertisements removal is pretty easy. They sit in the web browser and cannot hide themselves on a disk. Nevertheless, as I told above, some push notifications can promote malicious programs to your system. It is hard to describe all cases, and manual malware removal is a poor idea. Thus, after getting rid of the push notifications it is recommended to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended in the case when you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up notifications, but they still appeared. This situation can be a sign of malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both system recovery and malware removal purposes, thanks to its abilities of system recovery and multi-component detection system.
First of all, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to accomplish in both manual and automatic manner. The former, obviously, requires 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.
You may 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.
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:
- Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option:
- 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:
- Open Menu tab (three strips in upper right corner) and click the “Help” button. In the appeared menu choose “troubleshooting information”:
- In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:
After choosing this option, you will see the next message:
If you use Google Chrome
- Open Settings tab, find the “Advanced” button. In the extended tab choose the “Reset and clean up” button:
- In the appeared list, click on the “Restore settings to their original defaults”:
- 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
- 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:
- 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 site 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 Vgsks 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.
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).
How to Remove Vgsks Pop-ups?
Name: Vgsks
Description: Vgsks - 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 Vgsksc.com push notifications?” or “why do Vgsksc.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Vgsks 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
User Review
( votes)References
- More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
- Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.