Remove N.wigglewur Virus — How to Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
N.wigglewur pop-up advertisements appear out of the blue, bothering and irritating you. However, they are way more than annoying notifications – their essence is purely malicious, and they can install other malicious stuff to your PC. In this post, I will guide you on how to remove N.wigglewur pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with N.wigglewur pop-up advertisements will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the web pages it can show you can introduce malware to your system. These push notifications 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 N.wigglewur pop-ups?

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 N.wigglewur pop-ups is the malignant origins of the latter. Common push notifications are offered for you to enable with a straightforward purpose – notify you about the latest articles, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful tool to help your site to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested visitors to have the best deal.

Brief description of the N.wigglewurm.com pop-up ads:
NameN.wigglewurm.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address188.114.96.3
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorVons, News, News
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

N.wigglewur pop-ups, as opposed, are related to untrustworthy web pages. You will generally witness the offer to turn them on following the redirection from another website. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless it throws you to such a questionable place. In this case, turning on pop-up advertisements is offered under the guise of the anti-bot check. In other cases, the web pages may refuse to show you the contents unless you enable these push notifications. These theses should already raise suspicion, as sites commonly feature a different anti-bot mechanism. Spectating this demand is a reason to close the site doubtlessly. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not get to the site – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-ups.

N.wigglewur push notification

N.wigglewur push notification.

How does it work?

Most of web browsers support enabling push notifications from websites. Sites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content they want. It can be an advertisement of the product published on this site, as well as an ad of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but clicking it will redirect you to website Y – because a referral link to the latter was embedded.

Cyber burglars rely on this feature in their attempt to earn money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing them to show the banners, and then just spread hundreds of promotions of anyone they contract with. As you can suppose, no legit companies will contract with fraudsters. All the N.wigglewur push ads you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. In some cases, the same victim may get into a trap of several pop-up spamming web pages, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The ads these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a negligible payment for one view, but when you have hundreds of users and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a much bigger sum. Despite most of these banners are ineffective, it can still give all the parties a lot of profit.

Are N.wigglewur pop-up ads dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they may look harmless – just a blinking pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you generally see in pop-up notifications. N.wigglewurm.com website is controlled by fraudsters, who intendedly spread hundreds and thousands of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can launch sporadic pop-up advertisements into a storm of promotions. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all problems these pop-ups carry.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing that touches illegal ads, N.wigglewur pop-up notifications don’t have 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 ads 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, N.wigglewur pop-up ads are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove N.wigglewur pop-ups?

Fortunately, N.wigglewur pop-up advertisements removal is pretty easy. They parasite in the web browser and can’t hide themselves on a disk. However, as I pointed out before, some pop-up advertisements can promote malware to your system. It is nearly impossible to describe all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is inconvenient. Therefore, after disabling the pop-up ads it is recommended to use anti-malware software. I’d especially recommend that if you have never allowed pop-ups, but they still appeared. This situation can be a sign of malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware removal purposes, thanks to its abilities of system recovery and multi-component detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to accomplish in both manual and automatic manner. The former, obviously, requires 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 site 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 N.wigglewur 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 N.wigglewur Pop-ups?

Name: N.wigglewur

Description: N.wigglewur - 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 N.wigglewurm.com push notifications?” or “why do N.wigglewurm.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with N.wigglewur 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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