The browser opens by itself with advertising: what to do

Malicious software continues to improve, and its creators are looking for more and more ways to make money from inexperienced computer users. One of the modern methods of influencing users by viruses is the intrusive display of advertisements to them. This could be advertising for various casinos, bookmakers, binary options and other things.

To show advertising to the user, the virus must open the browser, or open a new tab in an already running browser and transfer the user to the advertised site. If the browser itself opens with advertisements, you need to solve this problem as soon as possible. In this article we will look at how to do this.

Table of contents:

Why does the browser open by itself with advertisements?

If the browser opens on its own with advertising without user interaction, this most likely indicates the presence of a virus. But this problem often persists even after the computer has been scanned and the infection itself has been eliminated.

This is due to the fact that the virus itself does not cause the browser to launch with certain sites. He just registered the command in the operating system task scheduler, which performs this task under certain conditions. After removing the virus from the computer, this task will not disappear from the scheduler and will continue to be executed. This is why antiviruses do not help solve the problem due to which the browser itself opens with advertising.

What to do if the browser opens by itself with advertising

As mentioned above, most often this browser behavior is due to the presence of a corresponding task in the task scheduler. It follows that to fix the problem, you will need to go into the task scheduler yourself and disable the command in it that is responsible for these actions.

To launch the task scheduler, press the Win+R combination on your keyboard. After this, the “Run” line will open, in which you need to enter the taskschd.msc command and click “OK” to execute it.

A list of scheduled processes that execute at a certain time or under certain conditions will open. Among the list of these tasks, you need to find the one that is responsible for spontaneously opening the browser and clicking on the link.

Important: Since virus creators try to disguise the changes they make as much as possible, most likely the name of the task will not correspond to its action. For example, a task may be called “Updating Driver”, but its actions will include launching the browser every time the computer boots to a specific site. Accordingly, in order to find a problematic task, you will need to study all the scenarios presented in the task scheduler and find the problematic one.

Having discovered a task that causes the browser to open by itself at certain moments, you need to select this task and click “Delete” on the right side of the utility.

A window will appear asking if you really need to delete. Click “Yes” to get rid of this task.

If after performing the steps described above the problem is not resolved, this indicates that the creators of the virus also hid the task of launching the browser in startup. At the same time, startup in the “Task Manager” in this case will not be informative, since the creators of viruses are more cunning and hide the process directly in the registry.

Open the registry editor with the regedit command in the Run window to check if there are startup commands to launch a browser with a specific site.