Does “Ads by GreatDeals” Pop-up appear on your web browser frequently and interrupt your online activities? Is your homepage suddenly changed to an odd site that you had never seen before? Are there tons of pop-up alerts that keep showing up and asking you to pay something you don’t need? Currently a large number of PC users get trouble in removing GreatDeals adware. This malware is associated with browser hijacker so it is difficult for average users to remove it. The following post will show you the best way to get rid of these annoying pop-up ads manually.
“Ads by GreatDeals” is a pop-up that annoys so many computer users lately. This pop up is generated by potentially unwanted programs (short for PUPs) and associated with adware and browser hijacker. It is prone to attack web browsers including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. This adware may look as a useful application at first sight by providing users available coupon codes and helping them save money while shopping online, but in fact it is just another malware that pretends to be useful. GreatDeals can display crazy coupons and deals ads at every corner of the compromised web browser, in all kinds of forms including pop-up, pop-under, in-text, banner or contextual advertisements, therefore you will find them annoying and disturbing whenever you try to get online. This kind of attack can be done without even asking for user’s permission. It is nasty so it is necessary to remove it from your computer before it is too late.
“Ads by GreatDeals” pop-up can get into a computer via many ways and mostly it installs packaged with other software – especially free programs and downloads such as TV shows, music or movies. This application claims it can make users’ web browsing more enjoyable by providing them special offers, coupons and deals related to their internet web browsing activity and help them save a lot of money. But in reality it is just a trick luring you to download unwanted programs or malware. Once it is installed, it will modify your browser settings and bombard you with unwanted pop-ups. Your search engine or homepage may have been changed, and your computer performance also gets reduced. New tab or even window with advertisement can be opened on any of your web browsers as well. In general, “Ads by GreatDeals” Pop-up can do nothing beneficial to computer users. It is created by programmers in order to create a revenue stream that offsets the expenses incurred when they make free programs, software or files available to the general public on the Internet. So that is why “Ads by GreatDeals” Pop-up always comes bundle with free software. Don’t click the pop up because it has sponsored links embedded. Once you click it, you will be taken to specific websites that the adware is trying to promote. You need to get rid of it manually instead.
If you open your browser window (includes IE, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome etc.) and notice immediately that your home page has been changed to a page you do not recognize, then your browser may have been hijacked by adware. For this type of adware, it can keep giving you GreatDeals pop-up ads. Other malicious activities can be shown on your computer after hijacked are listed below:
1. It can not only change your web pages, but also alter other settings to add toolbars, pop-up advertisements, and bookmarks that you did not create.
2. It can modify the homepage settings of your web browser, more commonly by reducing your internet security options. And the worse thing is it prevents you from changing them back.
3. New toolbars or Favorites are installed that give you icons and links to web pages that you don’t want.
4. It may block you from visiting certain website you’d like to visit and show an error page instead.
5. It will display constant pop-up ads, sometimes in such large amounts that you are not able to close neither the ads nor the browser.
“Ads by GreatDeals” pop up hijacks your browser to redirect your web search results and changes the homepage and browser settings. To completely uninstall it from an infected system, manual removal is the first choice because sometimes antivirus software cannot pick up the exact computer threat timely or remove it permanently. Now most browser hijackers are quite similar to spyware and adware threats and therefore cannot be removed with the help of popular antivirus products. Users can follow the manual guide here to get rid of this browser hijacker completely.
1. Clear all the cookies of your affected browsers.
Since this tricky hijacker virus has the ability to use cookies for tracing and tracking the internet activity of users, it is suggested users delete all the cookies before a complete removal.
Google Chrome:
Click on the “Tools” menu and click the “Clear browsing data” button.
Select “Delete cookies and other site data” to delete all cookies from the list.
Internet Explorer:
Open Internet explorer window
Click the “Tools” button
Point to “safety” and then click “delete browsing history”
Tick the “cookies” box, then click “delete”
Mozilla Firefox:
Click on Tools, then Options, select Privacy
Click “Remove individual cookies”
In the Cookies panel, click on “Show Cookies”
To remove a single cookie click on the entry in the list and click on the “Remove Cookie”
To remove all cookies click on the “Remove All Cookies” button
2. End the malicious process from Task Manager.
Once “Ads by GreatDeals” adware is installed, computer user may notice that CPU usage randomly jumps to 100 percent. At any time Windows always has many running processes. A process is an individual task that the computer runs. In general, the more processes, the more work the computer has to do and the slower it will run. If your system’s CPU spike is constant and remain at a constant 90-95%, users should check from Task Manager and see if there is a suspicious process occupying the system resources and then end it immediately.
(The name of the virus process can be random.)
Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to quickly bring up Task Manager Window：
3. Show hidden files and folders.
Open Folder Options by clicking the Start button, clicking Control Panel, clicking Appearance and Personalization, and then clicking Folder Options.
Click the View tab.
Under Advanced settings, click Show hidden files and folders, uncheck Hide protected operating system files (Recommended) and then click OK.
4. Remove all the malicious files related to GreatDeals ads hijacker manually.
%AppData%Local[random].exe
C:Documents and SettingsLocalServiceLocal SettingsTemporary Internet Files*.exe
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerMain StartPage
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun
Adverts titled with “Ads by GreatDeals” usually appear on computers that have been infected with adware. Of course they are something unwanted and annoying because those ads can appear anytime on your web browser and block you from surfing the web properly, especially when you are on e-commerce websites, such as eBay or Amazon. GreatDeals adware usually offers you to purchase some particular goods at very appealing price rate but it is important to know that this is just a trick to win your attention and make you click on one of their advertisements. Offers provided by GreatDeals are usually fake and therefore you should not click on them. In order to promote third parties web pages, the adware could collect information about your browsing habits, such as browsing history, search queries, most visited sites, or even your IP and email addresses. Considering this is an unsafe program and you had better uninstall it from the machine as soon as it is detected.
Note: If you are not a computer expert and have no idea how to perform the removal, please contact experts from YooCare Online Tech Support for further help.
Published by & last updated on May 23, 2015 1:08 am
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