Remove Giwens.live Virus — How to Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Giwens.live pop-up alerts can appear out of the blue, covering the content of the page you visited or opening your web browser when you don’t wish it to be opened.

Clicking the Giwens.live ad may trigger the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this guide, you will see the manual of Giwens.live popups removal in a couple of ways, as well as checking your system for other viruses existence.

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What are Giwens.live pop-ups?

Giwens.live popups are a result of adware action. Adware is a kind of malware that demonstrates to you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which generates a major amount of earnings for adware distributors. These advertisements may consist of sometimes shocking material, or have a web link to malevolent content/website, considering that adware maintainers have no purpose to check the goodness of the material they are going to show – their single target is money.

Giwens.live push notification

Giwens.live push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is a good, low-cost and very efficient marketing tool1. It makes it possible for the seller to link the customers’ interest to their website, and the buyers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they intend to buy. When the person will receive a pop-up alert that the TV set he desires to buy is offered at the online shop he/she checked out previously with a 15% price cut, one will undoubtedly use this chance and get it. Taking into consideration the exceptionally low price for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising instrument is a much-loved thing amongst the marketing departments of big online retailers.

Nevertheless, such a rewarding plan could not be missed by virus developers. Potential to demonstrate the popup advertisements by force to the victims of malware attack is an ideal basis for malicious tricks with the popup ads. And Giwens.live promotions is one of hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a info for the Giwens.live
SiteGiwens.live
HostingAS14061 DigitalOcean, LLC
United States, North Bergen
Infection TypeAdware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address159.223.153.123
SymptomsAnnoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behaviorGicems, Fixgroupfactor, Psoudult
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Giwens.live virus?

There are a number of ways of becoming contaminated by the adware that cause the Giwens.live popups storm. A lion’s part of this malware instances is after the free software or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Freeware can also be downloaded from the official site, and the adware is delivered as a legitimate bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A plenty of users oftentimes work with the dubious programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, various utilities that are free of cost, or even hacked programs. Every one of these kinds of applications are dangerous, due to the fact that it is quite easy to integrate a Giwens.live malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Giwens.live popup virus can additionally be concealed in the promotion somewhere on the strange site. Such websites are generally filled with intense and blinking ads, and their owners typically approve any promotions to be placed on their page. Thus, clicking on such banners is a shot in the dark: only the advertisement provider knows what will happen when you click this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you can additionally get something far more threatening, like ransomware or coin miner; the substantial share of coin miners circulation is exactly after the malicious ads.

People dislike popups

The statistic shows that people dislike popup advertising more than other types of promotions

Potentially undesirable applications, like Giwens.live pop-up virus can initiate a wide range of different problems on your computer. Distracting is not the only effect – pop-up notifications can present you the banners, where you are offered to download another dubious program, or “a effective anti-malware tool”. Scareware is usually distributed under the last slogun. Potentially unwanted applications, in turn, may have spyware functionality. And it is very hard to distinguish the undesirable app from a legit one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related ads are also chosen as a distribution method by different trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such viruses is 100% unwanted, and can cost you hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not tapping these banners, they can be clicked by whoever who also uses your PC – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without data loss. It is recommended to eliminate the viruses with antivirus applications as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Giwens.live pop-up advertisements?

The tutorial of Giwens.live adware elimination contains 2 parts. First, we need to eliminate the malware, and after that correct the consequences of its action. The elimination task is quite easy, because it can be done even with making use of Microsoft Defender – security program that is present on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nonetheless, as a result of its significant resources consumption, as well as some bugs that may be crucial for some groups of individuals, Defender is often turned off by the users, so its usage is most likely impossible. In addition, different trojan viruses have the ability to turn off the embedded antivirus. It is far better to make use of the separated program that will not have such vulnerabilities.

I would certainly suggest you to use Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven antivirus device that will undoubtedly exterminate the viruses from your system and also make an impenetrable shield with a Proactive protection function. However, let’s deal with Giwens.live adware first.

Removing Giwens.live popup virus with GridinSoft Anti-Malware

  • Download and install GridinSoft Anti-Malware. After the installation, you will be offered to perform the Standard Scan. Approve this action.
  • Gridinsoft Anti-Malware during the scan process

  • Standard scan checks the logical disk where the system files are stored, together with the files of programs you have already installed. The scan lasts up to 6 minutes.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware scan results

  • When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Giwens.live malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware - After Cleaning

Now, when the computer is clean of viruses, we can proceed to the browser reset. You can do this step manually, as well as with the use of GridinSoft Anti-Malware.

Reset browser settings to default

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 web browser will be connected the proper DNS while connecting to the web page you want. Create a text file named “hosts” on your desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following text3:

# 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.

Nevertheless, there is one problem that makes the things much more difficult to fix, especially without the anti-malware software. A lot of adware variants that are used to show you the Giwens.live pop-up ads are modifying the deep browser setups, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to change your browser settings after your PC was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly crash quickly. Sometimes, you will see no crash, but large lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 secs, and after that it will be back to the typical, up until you attempt to open settings one more time.

Reset your browser settings 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 the options for each browser. By default, they are set up in the manner which 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 last is also able to reset the HOSTS file without any additional commands.

How to Remove Giwens.live Pop-ups?

Name: Giwens.live

Description: Giwens.live - 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 Giwens.live push notifications?” or “why do Giwens.live pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Giwens.live 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 pop-up advertisements on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware overview and the reasons why I suggest it for malware removal.
  3. 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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