Watch-visd Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Watch-visd pop-up alerts can appear unexpectedly, covering the content of the page you went to or opening your web browser when you don’t want it to be opened.

Clicking the Watch-visd advertisement may lead to the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the tutorial of Watch-visd popups removal in a couple of ways, as well as checking your PC for additional viruses presence.

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What are Watch-visd pop-ups?

Watch-visd popups are an effect of adware activity. Adware is a type of malware that demonstrates to you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click advertisements, which creates a large amount of revenue for adware distributors. These advertisements may consist of sometimes shocking content, or have a link to harmful content/website, because adware maintainers have no purpose to inspect the goodness of the content they are going to show – their single target is cash.

Watch-visd push notification

Watch-visd push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is a good, low-cost and extremely efficient advertising method1. It permits the seller to link the buyers’ interest to their site, and the buyers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they wish to purchase. When the customer will get a pop-up alert that the TV set he likes to purchase is provided at the online store he/she saw previously with a 15% price cut, one will definitely use this opportunity and get it. Taking into consideration the incredibly low price for the popups and their targeting, such a marketing instrument is a favorite thing amongst the advertising departments of big online retailers.

Nonetheless, such a successful plan could not be missed by malware creators. Ability to show the popup ads by force to the people of malware attack is a great basis for malevolent manipulations with the popup ads. And Watch-visd.com promotions is one of hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a details for the Watch-visd
Site Watch-visd.com
Hosting AS14061 DigitalOcean, LLC
Netherlands, Amsterdam
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 104.248.199.158
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior Shopshopextension, Captcha, Security
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Watch-visd virus?

There are a lot of methods of getting contaminated by the adware that result in the Watch-visd popups storm. A lion’s part of this virus instances is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Freeware can likewise 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 individuals often make use of the uncertain programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, different apps that are free, or perhaps hacked programs. Every one of these kinds of software are risky, since it is extremely easy to build in a Watch-visd malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Watch-visd popup virus may additionally be concealed in the promotion somewhere on the strange site. Such websites are typically loaded with intense and blinking advertisements, and their owners usually approve any kind of promotions to be published on their web page. Thus, clicking such banners is a risky thing: only the advertisement provider realizes what will happen when you click this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or unwanted programs, you may likewise receive something far more dangerous, like ransomware or coin miner; the large share of coin miners circulation is exactly after the malicious promotions.

People dislike popups

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

Potentially unwanted programs, like Watch-visd popup virus can cause a wide range of different problems on your computer. Distracting is not the only effect – pop-up notifications may present you the ads, where you are offered to download one more dubious program, or “a amazing security tool”. Scareware is often distributed with the last motto. Potentially unwanted programs, in turn, may have spyware functions. And it is pretty hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a good one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related promotions are also chosen as a distribution method by different trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such viruses is 100% unwanted, and can cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And even if you are not interacting with these promotions, they can be clicked by someone who also uses your 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 wipe out the viruses with anti-malware programs as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Watch-visd pop-up advertisements?

The manual of Watch-visd adware elimination includes 2 sections. First, we need to remove the malware, and after that fix the consequences of its action. The elimination task is pretty simple, since it can be performed even with the use of Microsoft Defender – anti-malware tool that is available on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, due to its large resources consumption, along with some failures that can be pivotal for some groups of users, Defender is frequently disabled by the users, so its use is probably impossible. In addition, a variety of trojan viruses are able to switch off the embedded antivirus. It is much better to use the separated program that will not have such exposures.

I would certainly advise you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven antivirus tool that will undoubtedly erase the viruses from your computer and also make an impenetrable shield with a Proactive protection feature. However, let’s deal with Watch-visd adware initially.

Removing Watch-visd 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 Watch-visd 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 web browsers are reset, you need to make sure that your browser will definitely be connected the right DNS while connecting to the website you want. Make a text file named “hosts” on your desktop, after that 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 fix, specifically without the anti-malware software. The majority of adware variants that are utilized to show you the Watch-visd pop-up promotions are modifying the deep browser setups, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to change your browser settings after your computer was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly collapse quickly. In certain cases, you will see no crash, but large lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 seconds, and then it will be back to the typical, until 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 Watch-visd Pop-ups?

Name: Watch-visd

Description: Watch-visd - 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 Watch-visd.com push notifications?” or “why do Watch-visd.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Watch-visd 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 ads on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware overview and also 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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