Remove Xenia-jqq Pop-up Virus — How to Remove?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Xenia-jqq pop-ups appear out of the blue, bothering and irritating you. However, that is slightly more than annoying notifications – their essence is surely malignant, and they can introduce other malware to your computer. In this post, I will show you how to remove Xenia-jqq pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Xenia-jqq pop-up advertisements will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the pages it can open may introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups may also promote 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.

GridinSoft Anti-Malware Review
It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!
Removing Xenia-jqq manually may take hours and may damage your PC in the process. I recommend you to download GridinSoft Anti-Malware for threats removal. Allows to complete scan and cure your PC during the trial period.
Gridinsoft Anti-Malware 6-day trial available.
EULA | Privacy Policy | 10% Off Coupon
Subscribe to our Telegram channel to be the first to know about news and our exclusive materials on information security.

What are Xenia-jqq 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 ads and Xenia-jqq notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Common pop-up ads are offered for you to enable with a understandable purpose – notify you about the latest publications, discounts and so on. It is a useful thing to help your website to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested ones to have the best deal.

Brief description of the Xenia-jqq.com pop-up ads:
NameXenia-jqq.com
HostingAS14618 Amazon.com, Inc.
United States, Ashburn
IP Address34.199.240.39
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorExtension, Wounden, Abdoser
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Xenia-jqq pop-ups, in contrast, have a deal with untrustworthy sites. You will generally witness the proposition to turn them on after a redirection from another site. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless it throws you to such a dubious place. At that point, turning on pop-up advertisements is offered under the guise of the anti-bot check. In other cases, the websites can deny showing you the content unless you apply these pop-ups. These theses should already raise suspicion, as websites generally have a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing such an offer is a reason to leave the page doubtlessly. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the site – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up notifications.

Xenia-jqq push notification

Xenia-jqq push notification.

How does it work?

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

Cyber burglars bear on this feature in their attempt to earn money using illegal advertising. They trick victims into allowing them to show the banners, and then just spread numerous promotions of anyone they contract with. As you may suppose, no normal organisations will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Xenia-jqq push ads you may see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same user may get into a trap of several pop-up spamming sites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The promotions these rascals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It generally provides a negligible payment for one view, but when you can send ads to hundreds of users and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a way bigger sum. Despite most of such ads are ineffective, it can still give all the parties a lot of money.

Are Xenia-jqq pop-ups dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they can look non-threatening – just a blinking window that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the things this window promotes differ drastically from what you generally see in pop-ups. Xenia-jqq.com site is ruled by crooks, who deliberately throw tons of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can launch sporadic pop-up notifications into a storm of ads. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But troubles are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing that touches illegal ads, Xenia-jqq push notifications do not contain any legit deals to offer. Even though hackers make the ads looking similar to ones from well-known retailers, the site 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, Xenia-jqq push notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Xenia-jqq pop-ups?

Fortunately, Xenia-jqq pop-up advertisements removal is not very complicated. They parasite in the browser and can’t hide themselves in the system. However, as I stated above, some push notifications can introduce malicious software to your system. It is nearly impossible to show all cases, and manual malware removal is a poor idea. Therefore, after disabling the pop-ups it is recommended to use anti-malware software. That is especially recommended if you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-ups, and they still appeared. This situation may be a sign of adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware checkup purposes, because of its abilities of system recovery and multi-component detection system.

First and foremost, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in manual or automated way. 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 website 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 Xenia-jqq 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 Xenia-jqq Pop-ups?

Name: Xenia-jqq

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

Sending
User Review
3.6 (5 votes)
Comments Rating 0 (0 reviews)

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.

Leave a Reply

Sending