How to remove DigitalSkillLab pop-ups? — Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
DigitalSkillLab pop-up notifications appear when you do not expect, distracting and irritating you. Nonetheless, that is much more than annoying notifications – their origins is purely malicious, and they may install other malicious stuff to your system. In this post, I will guide you on how to remove DigitalSkillLab pop-up notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with DigitalSkillLab pop-ups will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the pages it can throw you to can introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups can also promote fake 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.

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What are DigitalSkillLab pop-up advertisements?

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 push notifications and DigitalSkillLab pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Common pop-up notifications are offered for you to enable with a straightforward purpose – keep you aware about the latest posts, discounts and so on. It is a useful tool to help your website to keep visitors and help the interested ones to have the best deal.

Brief summary of the Digitalskilllab.com pop-ups:
NameDigitalskilllab.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address172.67.142.64
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorLefthowdays, Akice, Channelmarket
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

DigitalSkillLab pop-up ads, in contrast, are related to less legit sites. You will generally see the offer to turn them on after a redirection from another page. Redirects are OK unless it throws you into such a questionable place. At that point, turning on push notifications is offered under the guise of the anti-bot filtering. In other cases, the sites may refuse to show you the content unless you turn on these pop-up notifications. These theses should raise suspicion, as sites commonly feature a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Seeing such an requirement is a reason to skip the website right away. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not get to the website – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up ads.

DigitalSkillLab push notification

DigitalSkillLab push notification.

How does this work?

Most of web browsers support enabling pop-ups from websites. Websites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content of their choice. It may be a promotion of the product or a page published on this particular website, or an ad of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but opening it will redirect you to site Y – because a link to that website was embedded.

Crooks bear on this feature in their attempt to gain money using illegal advertising. They trick users into allowing the pop-ups, and after that just spread numerous banners of other crooks they have a deal with. As you may suppose, no benevolent companies will contract with fraudsters. All the DigitalSkillLab notifications you may see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same user may be trapped by several pop-up spamming sites, 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 miserable commission for one view, but when you have a huge number of users and make it hundreds of times each day – that is a much more significant sum. Even though the majority of such ads are ineffective, it can still bring all the parties a lot of profit.

Are DigitalSkillLab pop-up notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they can look non-threatening – just a blinking window that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you generally see in push notifications. Digitalskilllab.com web page is controlled by fraudsters, who deliberately show tons of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can launch sporadic pop-up ads into a hurricane of ads. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But problems are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing related to illegal advertising, DigitalSkillLab pop-ups lack legit offers. Even though crooks make the banners similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the website these ads 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, DigitalSkillLab push notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove DigitalSkillLab pop-ups?

Fortunately, DigitalSkillLab push notifications removal is pretty easy. They reside in the web browser and cannot hide themselves among system files. Nevertheless, as I told above, some push notifications may introduce malicious software to your computer. It is hard to predict all of the cases, and manual malware removal is a poor idea. Thus, after getting rid of the pop-up notifications it is recommended to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended if you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up notifications, but they still appeared. That can be a sign of adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware removal purposes, because of its abilities of system recovery and superb detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to do in both manual and automatic manner. 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.

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 DigitalSkillLab 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 DigitalSkillLab Pop-ups?

Name: DigitalSkillLab

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