Read-the-notification pop-up notifications appear when you do not expect, bothering and annoying you. Still, that is way more than annoying notifications – their essence is clearly malignant, and they may bring other malware to your computer. In this post, I will guide you on how to remove Read-the-notification pop-up notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Read-the-notification pop-up notifications will be ineffective at best. At worst, the web pages it can throw you to can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up notifications can 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.

What are Read-the-notification 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 notifications and Read-the-notification notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal pop-up ads are offered for you to enable on different sites with a benevolent purpose – keep you aware about the latest publications, discounts and so on. It is a useful tool to help your website to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested visitors to have the best deal.

Brief description of the Read-the-notification.com pop-up ads:

Read-the-notification pop-up ads, on the other hand, are related to untrustworthy websites. You will generally see the proposition to turn them on following the redirection from another site. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless it throws you into such a questionable place. In this case, enabling pop-up ads is served as the anti-DDoS filtering. Alternatively, the web pages can deny showing you the contents unless you enable these pop-up ads. These demands should already raise suspicion, as websites generally have a different anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing such an offer should be the reason to leave the site doubtlessly. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the web page – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the push notifications.

How does it work?

The vast majority of web browsers support enabling pop-ups from sites. Sites, on the other hand, may send notifications with the content they want. It may be a promotion of the page listed on this particular site, as well as an ad of their partner page. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but clicking it will redirect you to site Y – because a referral link to that website was added.

Cybercriminals bear on this feature in their approach to gain money through advertising. They trick users into allowing the pop-ups, and after that just spread numerous banners of anyone they contract with. As you may suppose, no normal companies will contract with fraudsters. All the Read-the-notification popups you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same victim may be trapped by several pop-up spamming websites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The promotions these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a negligible pay for one viewer, but when you have a huge number of users and show them hundreds of ads every day – that is a much bigger sum. Despite most of such banners are ineffective, it can still give all the participants a lot of profit.

Are Read-the-notification pop-up ads dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they may look non-threatening – just a colourful window that appears from time to time. However, the things this window promotes differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-up advertisements. Read-the-notification.com website is controlled by crooks, who intendedly spread tons of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic push notifications into a storm of banners. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all problems these push notifications carry.

As any other thing that touches illegal ads, Read-the-notification pop-up notifications do not contain any legit deals to offer. Even though crooks make the ads similar to ones from well-known retailers, the web page 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 advertisements 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, Read-the-notification 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 Read-the-notification pop-ups?

Fortunately, Read-the-notification pop-up notifications removal is pretty easy. They sit in the browser and cannot hide themselves on a disk. However, as I pointed out before, some pop-up notifications may introduce malicious programs to your computer. It is nearly impossible to predict all of the cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a poor idea. Thus, after disabling the pop-up notifications it is recommended to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that if you have never allowed pop-up ads, and they still appeared. This situation can be a sign of adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware checkup purposes, thanks to its abilities of system recovery and superb 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.

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:

1. Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option:
2. 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. In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:

After choosing this option, you will see the next message:

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 linesOfficial Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.' data-wpel-link="internal" target="_self" rel="follow">²:

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 Read-the-notification 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).

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