How to remove Thenicejournal pop-ups? — Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Thenicejournal pop-up advertisements appear out of the blue, distracting and irritating you. However, that is slightly more than annoying pop-ups – their nature is purely malignant, and they can install other malicious stuff to your device. In this post, I will guide you on how to remove Thenicejournal push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Thenicejournal pop-up notifications will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the pages it can throw you to may introduce malware to your system. These push notifications can also promote fake 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 Thenicejournal pop-up 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 Thenicejournal notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Common pop-up advertisements are offered for you to enable on different sites with a straightforward purpose – notify you about the new articles, discounts and so on. It is a useful thing to help your site to retain visitors and help the interested ones to have the best deal.

Brief summary of the Thenicejournal.com pop-up ads:
NameThenicejournal.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address104.21.32.101
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorDispatchfeed, Topfieldnow, News
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Thenicejournal pop-ups, in contrast, have a deal with unlegit web pages. You will commonly witness the proposition to enable them following the redirection from another website. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless they throw you into such a questionable place. At that point, turning on pop-up ads is offered under the guise of the anti-bot check. In other cases, the sites can refuse to show you the contents unless you enable these pop-up ads. These theses should raise suspicion, as sites usually feature a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Spectating this offer should be the reason to skip the site doubtlessly. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not get to the web page – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up ads.

Thenicejournal push notification

Thenicejournal push notification.

How does it work?

Most of web browsers support enabling push notifications from websites. Sites, on the other hand, may send notifications with the content of their choice. It may be a promotion of the product or a page published on this website, or an ad of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but interacting with it will direct you to website Y – because a link to that website was built in.

Cyber burglars rely on this ability in their attempt to earn money using illegal advertising. They trick users into allowing the pop-ups, and then just spread hundreds of promotions of anyone they have a deal with. As you may suppose, no benevolent companies will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Thenicejournal popups you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same victim may be trapped by several pop-up spamming web pages, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The promotions these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It generally provides a negligible payment for one view, but when you have a huge number of users and show them hundreds of ads every day – that is a way bigger sum. Despite the majority of such banners giving no result at all, it may still bring all the participants a lot of profit.

Are Thenicejournal pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they can look non-threatening – just a colourful pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the things this window promotes differ sharply from what you used to see in pop-up advertisements. Thenicejournal.com site is controlled by crooks, who intendedly spread hundreds of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic pop-ups into a hurricane of banners. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all problems these push notifications carry.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing related to illegal ads, Thenicejournal pop-ups do not contain any legit deals to offer. Even though crooks make the ads looking similar to ones from well-known retailers, the website these banners 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 push 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, Thenicejournal 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 Thenicejournal pop-ups?

Fortunately, Thenicejournal pop-ups removal is pretty easy. They reside in the web browser and cannot conceal themselves on a disk. Nonetheless, as I told before, some pop-up advertisements may promote malicious software to your system. It is hard to show all of the cases, and manual malware removal is a poor idea. Therefore, after disabling the pop-up ads the best option is to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended if you have never allowed pop-up advertisements, and they still appeared. This situation may point at malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both system recovery and malware scanning purposes, thanks to its system recovery functionality and multi-layer detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to accomplish in manual or automated way. The former, obviously, requires more time to complete and can 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 website 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 Thenicejournal 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 Thenicejournal Pop-ups?

Name: Thenicejournal

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