Fast Captcha Virus

Fast Captcha

Fast Captcha is a webpage that can hijack your browser and cause it to display different obstructive ads and to page-redirect you without permission. Fast Captcha can also lead to other problems, such as the computer’s exposure to malware and hacker attacks.

Fast Captcha itself is not a serious threat to the system, as it is little more than a rogue page intended to collect data from your browser that can later be sold to advertisers, who would use it to target you with personalized ads. You’ve likely seen this before many times and know it’s a common practice that is employed by everyone, including legitimate sites, services, and apps. However, since Fast Captcha isn’t what we’d call a legitimate site, there are a lot of unknown factors regarding it such as what third parties your data may get sold to or how they may end up using it – targeted advertising is only one of the possible options.

What is Fast Captcha?

Fast Captcha is a particularly unpleasant browser-hijacking webpage that seeks to gain your permission to show push notifications in the browser. Fast Captcha uses misleading tactics to achieve this and then, once the permission is received, it begins to swarm the browser with ads.

Another problem with this rogue webpage is that it is capable of gaining notification permissions in your browser without you even realizing it and once this happens, the hijacker page would be free to spam you with all sorts of obstructive and aggressive content, a lot of which may not be safe. If this is the current situation in your browser, you’d better take immediate measures to remove Fast Captcha and everything related to it from your browser, or else you stand the risk of encountering Trojans, Spyware, Ransomware, and other particularly dangerous threats due to the continuous exposure to potentially unsafe ads.

The FastCaptcha.top virus

The FastCaptcha.top virus is any rogue program that forcefully changes the browser’s homepage to FastCaptcha.top and/or automatically page-redirects the user to it. The FastCaptcha.top virus is usually a free program that carries a hijacker component that takes control of the browser.

One common way a user may get Fast Captcha appended to their browser is through installing some free software that has a browser-modifying clause in its installer that, if checked, would allow Fast Captcha to become the browser’s homepage and/or to show push notifications in the browser. In such cases, it is important to remove both the Fast Captcha hijacker as well as the misleading free program that allowed it to get inside the browser. Such programs may have other unpleasant and unsafe features, and it’s inadvisable to keep them on your computer, which is why removing them is the first step from the Fast Captcha removal guide we will show you in a moment.

Fast Captcha on Chrome

Fast Captcha on Chrome is a problem with the Google Chrome browser where the browser’s homepage gets forcefully changed to Fast Captcha.com. Fast Captcha on Chrome is usually the result of the recent installation of a rogue program that has taken over the browser and modified it.

One way Fast Captcha, Captcha For Captcha and Top Captcha Today can get added to Chrome (or to any other browser) is the one we mentioned above – through a misleading free program that the user willingly installs. Another way, however, is through a notifications permission request that gets shown in the browser when you try to visit a certain site. The request is made to look as if you need to click Allow in order to visit the site you are interested in, but in reality, by clicking on Allow, you’d be giving your permission to Fast Captcha to spam you with annoying and aggressive push notifications, which is why Chrome, in spite of its strong security features, could still get infected by this hijacker.

SUMMARY:

How to remove Fast Captcha virus?

To remove the Fast Captcha virus, you have to clear the system and the browser from rogue data, software, and settings in the following way:

1. Find and delete any rogue program that may be responsible for the Fast Captcha infection.
2. If there are any rogue processes still running in the system, stop them.
3. Clean the settings of your computer – namely the Startup items, the DNS settings, the Hosts file, and the Registry.
4. Go to each browser on the system, delete any unwanted extensions, clear its data, and restore its settings.

The detailed instructions below will help you with the completion of these four steps.

Detailed removal instructions for Fast Captcha

Step 1

First, you must see if there’s a rogue program on your computer that may have forcefully allowed Fast Captcha to hijack the browser. Go to the Control Panel (you can search for it in the Start Menu) and click Uninstall a Program.

In the next window, search the list for a recently installed program or app that seems untrustworthy and that may have something to do with the hijacker infection. If you find anything, select it and use the Uninstall option from the top to enter its uninstallation manager, and then follow the uninstallation steps to delete the program. If the uninstaller asks if you’d prefer to keep any data related to the program, refuse this offer.

Step 2

WARNING! READ CAREFULLY BEFORE PROCEEDING!

Enter the Task Manager using the [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [Esc] combination from the keyboard and click Processes. Now look for anything named Fast Captcha or a name similar to this. If you find such a process, right-click it, go to the File Location of the process, then quit the process and delete the location folder.

If you don’t see such a process, look for other ones that seem suspicious to you – ones with excessive CPU and Memory use that also have unknown to you names. If you come across anything questionable, use the next two methods to check if it’s really a rogue process:

• Look up the name of the suspected process on the Internet – it’s highly likely that you will find relevant information about the process that would warn you if that process is rogue.
• Open the process’ file location and scan each file with this free malware scanner:
  
  Each file will be scanned with up to 64 antivirus programs to ensure maximum accuracy

  This scanner is free and will always remain free for our website's users.

  This file is not matched with any known malware in the database. You can either do a full real-time scan of the file or skip it to upload a new file. Doing a full scan with 64 antivirus programs can take up to 3-4 minutes per file.

  Full ScanUpload New File

  

  Drag and Drop File Here To Scan

  Upload File

  

  Analyzing 0 s

  Each file will be scanned with up to 64 antivirus programs to ensure maximum accuracy

  This scanner is based on VirusTotal's API. By submitting data to it, you agree to their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, and to the sharing of your sample submission with the security community. Please do not submit files with personal information if you do not want them to be shared.
  
  If a file or several files in that folder turn out to be malicious, the process must be stopped and its entire location folder – deleted. If deletion of something is not possible at the moment, try again after you finish the guide.

Step 3

Restart the system in Safe Mode – if there are any remaining rogue processes currently running on your computer, this should be enough to stop them until you complete the guide.

Step 4

Go to the Start Menu, one by one type the following lines in it, and hit Enter after each to go to the system settings they correspond to. Then follow the instructions for each to clean the system settings from unwanted changes.

• msconfig – This opens the System Configuration settings. When you go to them, click the Startup tab and uncheck, in the list shown there, anything that you do not recognize or the manufacturer of which is unknown. Also, obviously, if you see a Fast Captcha item shown there, uncheck that too. Click the OK button to save the made changes.

• ncpa.cpl – When you go there, click the icon of the network you use the most, open its Properties settings, and double-click on Internet Protocol Version 4. Then click the Obtain DNS server automatically option to make sure it’s enabled and then select Advanced. In there, go to the DNS tab and delete any IP that may be shown in the DNS server addresses list.

• notepad %windir%/system32/Drivers/etc/hosts – In the file that shows up, see if any text is written under “Localhost” at the end of the file, and send that text to us by writing us a comment on this page, and we will tell you if anything needs to be done about it. If no text was found there, directly proceed with the guide.

• regedit.exe – When you type this in the Start Menu and hit Enter, you will first be asked for admin permission to open the program – click Yes to provide it. Next, select the Edit menu in the Registry Editor window, then go to Find, type Fast Captcha, and select Find Next to start the search for related items. Delete whatever Fast Captcha item is found, search again, delete the next found item, and continue like this until all rogue items are gone from the Registry. After this, check these next Registry locations in the left panel of the Editor for questionable entries with randomized names that look like this “309ud032j8t830tu308rue093e3290i29e”. If you come across anything like this, write us a comment to tell us about it, and we will let you know if you should do anything about it.

Remove Fast Captcha from Chrome

To remove Fast Captcha from Chrome, you must complete the following actions in the same order:

1. Delete the Fast Captcha extension or any other rogue extensions from the browser.
2. Clear the browsing data of Chrome.
3. Remove any rogue search engine that Chrome may be allowed to use.
4. Finally, to remove Fast Captcha from Chrome, deny the notification permissions that this site may have in the browser.

Here is a more detailed explanation of how to complete those steps on most Windows-compatible browsers:

After you start the browser, click the menu icon in either top corner of the screen depending on what browser you are using, and then select the Extensions or Add-ons option. If you are a Google Chrome user, you’d first have to select More Tools, and then you will see the Extensions option in the side menu.

On the Extensions page, disable anything that you think may be rogue and then select its Remove button to delete it.

Next, go to Options/Settings from the menu of the browser, and click Privacy & Security (you may need to select Advanced first to see the Privacy & Security option). In there, click on Clear browsing data or Choose what to clear (for Edge), put ticks in everything except the Passwords box, and initiate the action.

After the browser data is deleted, search for “Notifications” using the search bar on the Settings page. Next, on Chromium-based browsers such as Google Chrome, Edge, and Opera, you must find and select Site Settings and then Notifications (under Permissions). If you are using the Firefox browser, just click Settings next to Notifications.

Now you will see what sites are given the permission to show notifications in the browser – block Fast Captcha if you see it in that list, as well as any other site you don’t recognize and trust.

Lastly, remember to perform all of the browser-cleaning actions for your other browsers as well.

If Fast Captcha is still bothering you

If this pesky hijacker persists or keeps coming back after you delete it, you may have a more serious problem on your hands, such as a Trojan Horse virus that is preventing you from successfully deleting Fast Captcha. In such cases, it’s best to use specialized software to find and delete any such hidden threats that may be in the computer. The powerful anti-malware tool we’ve linked in the guide is perfect for this task, as it can both take care of the Fast Captcha hijacker as well as delete any more serious harmful programs that may be hiding on the computer.