How to remove Peepholetwin pop-ups? — Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Peepholetwin pop-up notices can appear out of the blue, covering the content of the page you went to or opening your browser when you do not wish it to be opened.

Clicking on the Peepholetwin ad can result in the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this guide, you will see the guide of Peepholetwin popups removal in a couple of manners, as well as checking your system for other malware presence.

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What are Peepholetwin pop-ups?

Peepholetwin popups are a result of adware activity. Adware is a kind of malware that presents you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click promotions, which produces a significant volume of earnings for adware distributors. These ads might include explicit content, or have a link to harmful content/website, considering that adware maintainers have no purpose to check the goodness of the content they are going to reveal – their single target is cash.

Peepholetwin push notification

Peepholetwin push notification.

Pop-up advertising itself is an excellent, cheap and really effective advertising solution1. It allows the seller to attach the buyers’ attention to their site, and the customers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they want to purchase. When the customer will get a pop-up notification that the TV set he wishes to buy is available at the online store he/she saw previously with a 15% price cut, one will surely use this chance and purchase it. Considering the exceptionally low price for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising method is a favorite thing amongst the advertising teams of big internet stores.

Nevertheless, such a successful scheme could not be missed by malware developers. Potential to show the popup ads forcibly to the people of malware attack is an excellent basis for malicious manipulations with the popup advertisements. And Peepholetwin.com ads is one of hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a short details for the Peepholetwin site
Site Peepholetwin.com
Hosting AS39572 DataWeb Global Group B.V.
United States, Washington
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 192.243.59.13
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior Enactmedi, Hetaruvg, Notificator
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Peepholetwin virus?

There are a plenty of ways of becoming infected by the adware that result in the Peepholetwin popups tornado. A lion’s part of this computer virus instances is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Free software can also be downloaded from the main site, and the adware is offered as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A number of users regularly work with the unreliable programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, a wide range of utilities that are free, or perhaps hacked programs. Every one of these types of software are risky, since it is extremely simple to include a Peepholetwin malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

Peepholetwin popup malware may also be hidden in the advertisement somewhere on the strange site. Such web pages are generally full of colorful and blinking advertisements, and their proprietors usually accept any promos to be posted on their web page. For this reason, clicking on such banners is a shot in the dark: only the ad provider realizes what will occur when you click this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you can additionally receive something much more threatening, like ransomware or coin miner; the big share of coin miners distribution 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 programs, like Peepholetwin popup virus may initiate a lot of different problems on your personal computer. Distracting is not the single effect – pop-ups may display you the promotions, where you are offered to download another unknown application, or “a amazing anti-malware tool”. Scareware is often spread with the use of the last motto. Potentially undesirable programs, in turn, can have spyware functions. And it is very hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a normal one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related ads are also exploited as a spreading way by various trojan viruses, for example – 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 clicking these banners, they can be clicked by whoever who also uses your personal computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the things may become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without information loss. It is recommended to get rid of the viruses with antivirus programs as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Peepholetwin pop-up advertisements?

The guide of Peepholetwin adware elimination includes 2 parts. First, we need to deal with the malware, and afterwards correct the consequences of its activity. The elimination process is really easy, due to the fact that it can be performed even with using Microsoft Defender – anti-virus program that is present on all computers with Windows 8/10. However, due to its significant resources utilization, along with some defects that can be critical for some groups of users, Defender is often disabled by the users, so its use is most likely impossible. In addition, different trojan viruses are capable to turn off the embedded antivirus. It is better to use the separated program that will not have such exposures.

I would certainly suggest you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven antivirus device that will undoubtedly remove the malware from your PC and also create an invulnerable shield with a Proactive protection function. But let’s take care of Peepholetwin adware first.

Removing Peepholetwin 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 Peepholetwin 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 correct DNS while connecting to the website you want. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your computer’s 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 more difficult to restore, especially without the anti-malware software. Most of adware versions that are used to show you the Peepholetwin pop-up ads are adjusting the deep browser settings, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to change your browser settings after your machine was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will crash soon. In certain cases, you will see no crash, but large lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 seconds, and after that it will be back to the normal, till you attempt to open settings once more.

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 Peepholetwin Pop-ups?

Name: Peepholetwin

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