Phonenow
The PhoneNow.net pop-ups is an advertising website designed to tout the products and services offered by third parties willing to spread the word. Pop-up tools such as PhoneNow.net get paid to advertise what those paying third parties have to offer. The goal is clear – to reach as many potential customers as possible via paid advertising campaigns. Although such campaigns are pretty standard these days and should pose no threats to their recipients, cybercrooks may occasionally use such a campaign to spread malware. What should you be aware of in particular?
The first signs of concern arrive when a tool such as PhoneNow.net shows up on your desktop out of nowhere and forces you to allow notifications redirecting you to sponsored links and places on the Web. Should you accept the prompt and fall for the trap, you will experience an influx of Web pop-ups, banners, and e-shop advertisements offering all sorts of stuff. Eventually, those pop-ups will keep growing exponentially until you can no longer browse the Web at peace. The banners will fill up your entire screen, increasing your chance of clicking on a link that may be safe or may execute a corrupted code. The thing is, you never know what you’re going to get.
A pay-per-click mechanism is a well-oiled machine that works just fine for PhoneNow.net and other popular adware programs – you click on an ad to go to an online shop to buy some stuff, and the guys at PhoneNow.net get a dime for bringing you in. As long as the sponsored advertisements are malware-free, you may take advantage of them if you want. However, you can step on a mine anytime, which is why you’d be better off using legit adware that has outlined its terms and conditions beforehand.
If PhoneNow.net keeps showing up on your browser even if you no longer visit its page, you may want to get rid of it altogether. To do so, you may need to delete any unknown or unused plugins and add-ons or even reset your browser. Yet, you will stand the best chance of removing it for good by using a reputable anti-malware scanner.
