I wrote this article to help you remove Popular123.com. This Popular123.com removal guide works for Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Popular123.com is a search provider which also functions as a shopping assistant. The website has sections for popular trends, sales and categories which feature a plethora of commodities. You can conduct your keyword searches and look for shopping deals from the same place. The convenience Popular123.com provides can be enough to win you over instantly. We need to remind you that you should not neglect the aspect of security. If you look for information regarding the ownership of the website, you will discover that there is none. The developers of Popular123.com have not disclosed their identity. The lack of disclosure can be considered a red flag. Putting the website to the test has confirmed the suspicions about it.

Popular123.com is a pawn of a hijacker. The insidious program targets the web browser. It can penetrate Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge and other established browsing clients. Upon entering your system, it will append changes to your DNS settings. The hijacker will make Popular123.com your homepage and default search provider. This gives the sinister program the ability to interfere with your organic browsing sessions. The purpose here is to lead users to supported websites. The owners of the hijacker make profit by promoting third party content. There are a lot of vendors who pay to have their platforms linked to. The service of running online advertising campaigns is legal. It should be noted that it is subject to a set of rules and regulations. The Popular123.com hijacker does not meet them.

When it comes to marketing, the direct approaches are proven to be more effective than the passive strategies. The Popular123.com hijacker generates ads. The intrusive content is brought in different formats. Your screen will be flooded with freebies, banners, in-text links, coupon boxes, interstitial, contextual, transitional, comparison, inline and floating windows. To acquire people’s interest, the covert program shows them bargain deals for high quality goods. You can expect offers for clothes, accessories, furniture, technological devices, decorations, gardening equipment, sports gear, games, toys and other products. Do not allow the clandestine program to cloud your better judgment. The sources for the proposed items are not confirmed to be reliable.

Perhaps the most severe threat around the Popular123.com hijacker is data theft. The rogue program has tracking capabilities. It will monitor your sessions. The consequences depend on the information you have entered into your browser. The Popular123.com hijacker can access your browsing history, cookies, keystrokes, IP address, email, geographic location, demographic profile, telephone number, user names and passwords. The gathered input is packed into catalogs and sent to the owners of the nefarious program. They can sell it on darknet markets without asking for authorization. The people who purchase your personal details can use them to break into your personal and financial accounts. They can withdraw your funds and steal your identity.

The Popular123.com hijacker is spread in a couple of ways. The preferred distribution technique is bundling. The furtive program can travel with freeware, shareware and pirated versions of licensed utilities. The download client will include the unwanted tool as a bonus. Note that the option will be listed in its terms and conditions. If you skip through the installation steps in haste and agree to the default settings, the hijacker will be granted accessibility to your system. When choosing programs, you should do your research to check if they are reliable. Select the custom or advanced installation mode to have all options shown.

The other propagation vector is spam emails. The setup file of the Popular123.com hijacker can be packed with an attachment to the letter. The sender will urge you to access the appended document right away. The message will be devised to resemble a notification from a given organization, like a bank, a courier firm, an institution, a government branch, a social network, a shopping platform, the national post or the local police department. To tell between spam and legitimate postage, check the email account it was sent from. If the sender is a genuine representative of the entity in question, he would have used an official account to contact you.

Popular123.com Removal

Before starting the real removal process, you must reboot in Safe Mode. If you are familiar with this task, skip the instructions below and proceed to Step 2. If you do not know how to do it, here is how to reboot in Safe mode:

For Windows 98, XP, Millenium and 7:
Reboot your computer. When the first screen of information appears, start repeatedly pressing F8 key. Then choose Safe Mode With Networking from the options.

For Windows 8/8.1
Click the Start button, next click Control Panel —> System and Security —> Administrative Tools —> System Configuration.‌

Check the Safe Boot option and click OK. Click Restart when asked.
For Windows 10
Open the Start menu and click or tap on the Power button.

While keeping the Shift key pressed, click or tap on Restart.

Here are the steps you must perform to remove the hijacker from the browser:

Remove From Mozilla Firefox:

Open Firefox, click on top-right corner , click Add-ons, hit Extensions next.

Look for suspicious or unknown extensions, remove them all.

Remove From Chrome:

Open Chrome, click chrome menu icon at the top-right corner —>More Tools —> Extensions. There, identify the malware and select chrome-trash-icon(Remove).

Remove From Internet Explorer:
Open IE, then click IE gear icon on the top-right corner —> Manage Add-ons.

Find the malicious add-on. Remove it by pressing Disable.

Right click on the browser’s shortcut, then click Properties. Remove everything after the .exe” in the Target box.

Open Control Panel by holding the Win Key and R together. Write appwiz.cpl in the field, then click OK.

Here, find any program you had no intention to install and uninstall it.

Run the Task Manager by right clicking on the Taskbar and choosing Start Task Manager.

Look carefully at the file names and descriptions of the running processes. If you find any suspicious one, search on Google for its name, or contact me directly to identify it. If you find a malware process, right-click on it and choose End task.

Open MS Config by holding the Win Key and R together. Type msconfig and hit Enter.

Go in the Startup tab and Uncheck entries that have “Unknown” as Manufacturer.

Still can not remove Popular123.com from your browser? Please, leave a comment below, describing what steps you performed. I will answer promptly.