Megawinners.live Ads Removal Guide — Fix Push Notification

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Megawinners.live pop-up advertisements appear out of the blue, disturbing and irritating you. Nonetheless, they are way more than just notifications – their essence is clearly malicious, and they may install other malware to your system. In this post, I will show you how to remove Megawinners.live push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Megawinners.live pop-up notifications will be ineffective at best. In worst case scenario, the web pages it can show you can introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups can also promote fake online shopping websites which will take your money and payment info. The latter generally ends up with losing all the money you have on the exposed card.

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What are Megawinners.live push notifications?

As the pop-up definition goes, these are short and small advertisements that attract your attention to a product they promote. But the difference between regular pop-ups and Megawinners.live notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal pop-ups are offered for you to enable with a straightforward purpose – keep you aware about the new articles, discounts and so on. It is a useful thing to help your website to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested ones to have the best deal.

Brief description of the Megawinners.live pop-ups:
NameMegawinners.live
HostingAS202053 UpCloud Ltd
Germany, Frankfurt am Main
IP Address94.237.84.54
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorSaniceproxic, Thestreameast, Block
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Megawinners.live push notifications, in contrast, are related to less legit sites. You will generally observe the proposition to turn them on after a redirection from another website. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless it throws you into such a dubious place. At that point, turning on pop-ups is served under the guise of the anti-bot check-up. Alternatively, the sites can deny showing you the content unless you apply these push notifications. These theses should already raise suspicion, as sites usually have a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Seeing such an demand is a reason to close the site doubtlessly. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not get to the web page – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the push notifications.

Megawinners.live push notification

Megawinners.live push notification.

How does this work?

The majority of web browsers support enabling pop-ups from sites. Sites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content they like. It may be a promotion of the product or a page listed on this site, or an ad of their partner page. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but interacting with it will redirect you to website Y – because a referral link to the latter was built in.

Scoundrels bear on this feature in their approach to gain money using illegal advertising. They trick users into turning on pop-ups, and then just spread hundreds of promotions of anyone they contract with. As you may suppose, no benevolent companies will contract with fraudsters. All the Megawinners.live popups you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same victim may be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming websites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The promotions these rascals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a miserable commission for one person, but when you have a huge number of victims and make it hundreds of times each day – that is a way bigger sum. Despite the majority of these ads are ineffective, it may still give all the participants a lot of profit.

Are Megawinners.live pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look safe – just a blinking window that appears from time to time. However, the things this window promotes differ sharply from what you used to see in pop-up advertisements. Megawinners.live website is ruled by crooks, who intentionally throw hundreds and thousands of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic pop-up advertisements into a storm of promotions. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all problems these pop-up notifications carry.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing that touches illegal ads, Megawinners.live pop-up notifications lack legit offers. Even when crooks make the ads looking similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the web page these ads will throw you to are completely different. And these pages may offer you to turn on other pop-ups, install a “useful” program, or pay for a thing at a big discount and never receive it. Let’s leave aside the cases when pop-up notifications promote phishing pages or straightforward malware. There’s no way these pages will bring you any good, thus interacting with them is a very bad idea. For the same reason, Megawinners.live pop-up advertisements are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Megawinners.live pop-ups?

Fortunately, Megawinners.live pop-up notifications removal is not very complicated. They sit in the browser and cannot conceal themselves in the system. Nonetheless, as I pointed out above, some push notifications can introduce malware to your computer. It is nearly impossible to show all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a bad idea. Thus, after removing the source of the pop-up ads the best option is to use anti-malware software. I’d especially recommend that in the case when you have never allowed pop-up notifications, and they still appeared. That may be a sign of malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware checkup purposes, thanks to its abilities of system recovery and advanced detection system.

Initially, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in both manual and automatic manner. The former, obviously, takes more time to complete and may be somewhat complicated if you have never done that. Automated supposes the use of anti-malware programs that can reset all browser settings at once.

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

Reset your browsers manually

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 browser will connect the right DNS while connecting to the web page you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following lines2:


# 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.

Scan your system for possible viruses

After removing the Megawinners.live push notifications, it’s time to see if these pop-ups brought any threat to your system. Launch GridinSoft Anti-Malware, and then click on Standard scan. It will be enough in most cases to find and remove malware. The scan will last 5-10 minutes; you are free to use your system during that process.

GridinSoft Anti-Malware during the scan process

Once the scan is complete, you will see the detections or a notification about a clean system. Proceed with pressing the Clean Up button (or OK when nothing is detected).

GridinSoft scan finished

How to Remove Megawinners.live Pop-ups?

Name: Megawinners.live

Description: Megawinners.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 Megawinners.live push notifications?” or “why do Megawinners.live pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Megawinners.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 this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
  2. 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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