Watchclick Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Watchclick pop-up alerts can show up unexpectedly, covering the material of the site you checked or opening your web browser when you don’t wish it to be opened.

Clicking on the Watchclick promotion can cause the injection of other malware or unwanted programs. In this guide, you will see the guide of Watchclick popups removal in various methods, and also inspecting your system for other malware existence.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Watchclick manually may take hours and may damage your PC in the process. I recommend you to download GridinSoft Anti-Malware for threats removal. Allows to complete scan and cure your PC during the trial period.

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What are Watchclick pop-ups?

Watchclick popups are an outcome of adware activity. Adware is a type of malware that suggests you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which creates a major volume of earnings for adware representatives. These ads may consist of explicit material, or have a link to harmful content/website, since adware maintainers have no reason to examine the goodness of the content they are going to reveal – their solitary target is cash.

Watchclick push notification.

Pop-up promotions itself is a very good, low-priced and really productive marketing solution¹. It allows the vendor to link the customers’ attention to their site, and the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they intend to purchase. When the person will receive a pop-up alert that the TV set he wishes to buy is available at the online shop he/she visited earlier with a 15% price cut, one will undoubtedly use this chance and get it. Considering the exceptionally low cost for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising method is a favourite thing amidst the marketing departments of big online stores.

However, such a profitable plan could not be missed by virus creators. Option to demonstrate the popup advertisements forcibly to the people of malware invasion is a great basis for malicious adjustments with the popup promotions. And Watchclick.site advertisements is one of hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a summary for the Watchclick

How have I got the Watchclick virus?

There are a plenty of ways of getting infected by the adware that create the Watchclick popups tornado. A lion’s part of this malware instances is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Freeware can likewise be downloaded from the official site, and the adware is provided as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A number of individuals often work with the unreliable programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, different apps that are free of cost, or even hacked programs. Every one of these sorts of software are dangerous, due to the fact that it is very easy to include a Watchclick malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

Watchclick popup virus can additionally be hidden in the ad somewhere on the odd site. Such sites are typically loaded with bright and blinking advertisements, and their proprietors typically approve any kind of promos to be published on their web page. Thus, clicking such banners is a shot in the dark: only the ad contractor realizes what will happen when you press this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you may additionally get something far more risky, like ransomware or coin miner; the large share of coin miners circulation is exactly after the malicious ads.

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

Potentially unwanted programs, like Watchclick popup virus may provoke a variety of troubles on your PC. Distracting is not the only problem – pop-ups can present you the promotions, where you are offered to get one more dubious program, or “a perfect security tool”. Scareware is often distributed under the last slogun. Potentially unwanted applications, in turn, may have spyware functionality. And it is pretty hard to distinguish the undesirable app from a legit one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and fake antiviruses, popup-related promotions are also chosen as a distribution way by different trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such viruses is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And even if you are not tapping these banners, they can be clicked by whoever who also makes use of your computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the things can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without data and money loss. It is recommended to eliminate the viruses with antivirus programs as soon as possible.

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

The tutorial of Watchclick adware clearing consists of 2 sections. First, we need to deal with the malware, and afterwards deal with the results of its activity. The removal procedure is very easy, due to the fact that it can be executed even with the use of Microsoft Defender – anti-virus program that is present on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, because of its substantial resources consumption, along with some bugs that may be crucial for some kinds of users, Defender is often turned off by the users, so its use is likely impossible. What’s more, a wide range of trojan viruses are able to shut off the embedded antivirus. It is better to use the separated program that will not have such weakness.

I’d suggest you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware² – a well-proven anti-malware tool that will surely wipe out the malware from your system and make an invulnerable cover with a Proactive protection feature. But let’s deal with Watchclick adware initially.

Removing Watchclick 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.

• 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.

• When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Watchclick malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.

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. 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. In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option :

After choosing this option, you will see the next message :

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 proper DNS while connecting to the website you need. Make a text file named “hosts” on your computer’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following text³:

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.

However, there is one trouble that makes things a lot more difficult to restore, especially without the anti-malware software. The majority of adware versions that are utilized to show you the Watchclick pop-up advertisements are altering the deep browser setups, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to change your browser settings after your computer was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will crash quickly. In certain cases, you will see no crash, but huge lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 secs, and after that it will be back to the normal, up until you attempt 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.

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.

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 Watchclick Pop-ups?

Name: Watchclick

Description: Watchclick - 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 Watchclick.site push notifications?” or “why do Watchclick.site pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Watchclick 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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1. More about pop-up ads on Wikipedia.
2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware overview and the reasons why I advise it for malware removal.
3. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.