Remove Moonst.click Pop-up Virus — How to Remove?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Moonst.click pop-up notifications may appear out of the blue, covering the content of the site you visited or opening your browser when you don’t desire it to be opened.

Clicking the Moonst.click promotion may trigger the injection of different malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the guide of Moonst.click popups removal in various ways, and also examining your system for other malware presence.

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What are Moonst.click pop-ups?

Moonst.click popups are a consequence of adware activity. Adware is a type of malware that demonstrates to you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click advertisements, which produces a major volume of income for adware distributors. These advertisements might have sometimes shocking information, or have a web link to malevolent content/website, due to the fact that adware maintainers have no purpose to inspect the goodness of the web content they are going to show – their solitary target is money.

Moonst.click push notification

Moonst.click push notification.

Pop-up promotions itself is a very good, affordable and really effective marketing solution1. It allows the vendor to link the buyers’ attention to their website, and the buyers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they wish to purchase. When the customer will get a pop-up notification that the TV set he likes to purchase is offered at the online shop he/she saw previously with a 15% price cut, one will definitely use this chance and purchase it. Taking into consideration the extremely low price for the popups and their targeting, such a promotion and marketing instrument is a much-loved thing among the advertising departments of huge online sellers.

Nonetheless, such a rewarding plan could not be missed by malware creators. Option to show the popup advertisements by force to the people of malware attack is a great basis for malevolent adjustments with the popup advertisements. And Moonst.click promotions is among hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a short summary for the Moonst.click
Site Moonst.click
Hosting AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 104.21.44.132
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior Wnprt, News, Safesystems
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Moonst.click virus?

There are a huge amount of methods of becoming contaminated by the adware that cause the Moonst.click popups storm. A lion’s part of this computer virus incidents is after the free software or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Freeware may likewise be downloaded from the main website, and the adware is offered as a legitimate bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A number of users regularly work with the unreliable programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, various utilities that are free, or perhaps hacked programs. Every one of these kinds of software are unsafe, since it is extremely easy to build in a Moonst.click malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

Moonst.click popup virus can additionally be hidden in the advertisement somewhere on the strange web page. Such sites are generally filled with intense and blinking ads, and their proprietors often approve any type of promos to be placed on their web page. Hence, clicking such banners is a shot in the dark: only the advertisement contractor realizes what will happen when you press this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you can also receive something far more threatening, like ransomware or coin miner; the large share of coin miners distribution is exactly after the malicious advertisements.

People dislike popups

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

Potentially unwanted programs, like Moonst.click popup virus may cause a lot of different troubles on your PC. Distracting is not the only problem – pop-ups may show you the banners, where you are offered to get another unknown program, or “a perfect security tool”. Scareware is often spread with the last slogun. Potentially undesirable programs, in turn, can have spyware functions. And it is quite hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a normal one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and fake antiviruses, popup-related banners are also chosen as a distribution method by various trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such malware is 100% unwanted, and can cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And even if you are not tapping these advertisements, they may be clicked by whoever who also makes use of your PC – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the things may become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without data and money loss. It is recommended to get rid of the viruses with antivirus programs as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Moonst.click pop-up advertisements?

The tutorial of Moonst.click adware clearing includes 2 sections. First, we need to remove the malware, and afterwards take care of the effects of its activity. The removal task is pretty easy, because it may be performed even with using Microsoft Defender – anti-virus tool that is available on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, due to its significant resources consumption, along with some bugs that may be crucial for some types of individuals, Defender is frequently disabled by the users, so its usage is likely impossible. Additionally, a wide range of trojan viruses are capable to shut off the embedded antivirus. It is better to use the separated program that will not have such vulnerabilities.

I would certainly suggest you to use Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven security device that will surely eliminate the malware from your PC and create an invulnerable shield with a Proactive protection feature. But let’s handle Moonst.click adware first.

Removing Moonst.click 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 Moonst.click 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 make sure that your web browser will definitely connect the right DNS while connecting to the web page you want. Create a text file named “hosts” on your desktop, then 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.

Nonetheless, there is one problem that makes things a lot harder to restore, particularly without the anti-malware software. The majority of adware variations that are used to show you the Moonst.click pop-up ads are modifying the deep browser settings, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to fix your browser settings after your computer was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly crash quickly. Sometimes, you will see no crash, however, huge lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 seconds, and then it will be back to the typical, till you try to open settings once again.

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 Moonst.click Pop-ups?

Name: Moonst.click

Description: Moonst.click - 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 Moonst.click push notifications?” or “why do Moonst.click pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Moonst.click 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 review and the reasons why I recommend it for malware elimination.
  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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