How to remove Win-scan pop-ups? — Fix Guide

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

Clicking the Win-scan promotion can result in the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this guide, you will see the tutorial of Win-scan popups removal in several manners, and also examining your system for extra viruses existence.

GridinSoft Anti-Malware Review
It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!
Removing Win-scan 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.
Gridinsoft Anti-Malware 6-day trial available.
EULA | Privacy Policy | 10% Off Coupon
Subscribe to our Telegram channel to be the first to know about news and our exclusive materials on information security.

What are Win-scan pop-ups?

Win-scan popups are an outcome of adware presence. Adware is a kind of malware that suggests you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which generates a significant volume of revenue for adware representatives. These promotions might contain explicit content, or have a link to malicious content/website, since adware maintainers have no purpose to inspect the goodness of the web content they are going to reveal – their solitary target is money.

Win-scan push notification

Win-scan push notification.

Pop-up promotions itself is an excellent, cheap and also very efficient advertising solution1. It makes it possible for the vendor to attach the buyers’ interest to their website, and the buyers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they want to buy. When the customer will receive a pop-up alert that the TV set he likes to purchase is offered at the online shop he/she checked out earlier with a 15% discount, one will certainly use this possibility and get it. Taking into consideration the very low cost for the popups and their targeting, such a promotion and marketing tool is a much-loved thing amidst the marketing teams of huge internet retailers.

Nonetheless, such a profitable scheme could not be missed by malware creators. Ability to show the popup advertisements by force to the people of malware attack is an excellent basis for malevolent tricks with the popup advertisements. And Win-scan.com advertisements is among hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a info for the Win-scan
SiteWin-scan.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
Infection TypeAdware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address162.159.138.85
SymptomsAnnoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behaviorSecuredevicesolutions, Securesoftware, News
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Win-scan virus?

There are a lot of ways of becoming infected by the adware that trigger the Win-scan popups tornado. A lion’s part of this computer virus instances is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Free software can also be downloaded from the official website, and the adware is supplied as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A plenty of users regularly work with the uncertain programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, different utilities that are free, or perhaps hacked programs. All of these kinds of programs are dangerous, due to the fact that it is very easy to integrate a Win-scan malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a part of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

Win-scan popup malware may also be hidden in the promotion somewhere on the odd web page. Such web pages are generally full of bright and blinking ads, and their proprietors typically permit any promotions to be placed on their page. Therefore, clicking such banners is a risky thing: only the advertisement contractor realizes what will occur when you click this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you can additionally receive something far more unsafe, like ransomware or coin miner; the large 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 applications, like Win-scan popup virus can initiate a lot of different problems on your PC. Distracting is not the only problem – pop-ups can show you the ads, where you are offered to download one more strange application, or “a effective security tool”. Scareware is usually spread with the last motto. Potentially unwanted applications, in turn, can have spyware functionality. And it is quite hard to distinguish the undesirable app from a normal one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related promotions are also exploited as a spreading way by various trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such malware is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And even if you are not clicking these ads, they may be clicked by someone who also makes use of your personal computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation may become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without data loss. It is recommended to get rid of the viruses with anti-malware applications as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Win-scan pop-up advertisements?

The tutorial of Win-scan adware clearing consists of 2 sections. First, we need to remove the malware, and then deal with the consequences of its activity. The elimination process is quite simple, because it may be executed even with making use of Microsoft Defender – anti-virus software that is present on all computers with Windows 8/10. However, due to its large resources consumption, along with some errors that may be serious for some groups of individuals, Defender is often turned off by the users, so its use is likely impossible. What’s more, a variety of trojan viruses have the ability to disable the embedded antivirus. It is better to use the separated program that will not have such exposures.

I’d recommend you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven antivirus tool that will surely eliminate the viruses from your personal computer and create an impenetrable cover with a Proactive protection function. But let’s manage Win-scan adware first.

Removing Win-scan 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 Win-scan 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 definitely connect the accurate DNS while connecting to the website you want. Create a text file named “hosts” on your computer’s desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following content3:

# 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 issue that makes the things a lot more difficult to repair, particularly without the anti-malware program. Most of adware versions that are used to show you the Win-scan pop-up promotions are adjusting the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to change your browser settings after your machine was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly crash quickly. In some cases, you will see no crash, however, significant lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 seconds, and then it will be back to the normal, until you try 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.

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 Win-scan Pop-ups?

Name: Win-scan

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

Sending
User Review
3.25 (4 votes)
Comments Rating 0 (0 reviews)

References

  1. More about pop-up ads on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware review 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.

Leave a Reply

Sending