Womadsmart Pop-up Virus — How to Remove Unwanted Ads?

Womadsmart.com pop-ups that you can see while navigating the Internet are a consequence of a malware activity that resides inside your web browser. Such pop-ups emerge in excessive quantities, distracting and annoying you.

Most of the pop-ups from Womadsmart.com site are irrelevant to your choices, as it shows any marketing content it receives a deal for. Given that many pages promoted in this manner are not legitimate, it is clear to expect them to feature malicious components. In particular, they can expose you to various varieties of web deceptions.

What are Womadsmart pop-up advertisements?

By some of the attributes, Womadsmart.com pop-ups are similar to typical pop-ups you may come across on regular websites. However, all the difference – and malignancy – stems from this specific website. Pages like Womadsmart are often formed with just one objective – to present unsuspecting users to enable pop-ups and then start spamming them.

Brief summary of the Womadsmart.com pop-ups:

Name Womadsmart.com
Hosting AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address 172.67.148.252
Malware type Adware1
Effect Unwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard level Medium
Malware source Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behavior Bestchainpc, News, News
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Ads by the Womadsmart.com site are not genuine either. At best, those will be entirely irrelevant banners, that will still be annoying taking into account the frequency. Nevertheless, more common scenarios involve advertisements of obscure deals with 90% off, adult sites ads or scam attempts. Presented here are some of the classic patterns for pop-ups spam:

  • Your system is infected with 15 viruses. Contact our tech support or perform an immediate scan.
  • You’ve received a new message on Facebook, Twitter, or WhatsApp. Beware of phishing links.
  • Visit this new, totally legitimate shopping site and claim your 95% discount coupon.
  • Sign in on this new crypto exchange website and receive a substantial crypto bonus.
  • Discover 5 (10, 20, or even 50) women near you who are eager to chat.
  • Speed up your computer with an incredibly effective system cleaner.

Due to the unlawful marketing approach of Womadsmart.com, no authentic corporations will really utilize their promotion services. Instead, the entire spectrum of topics I’ve outlined above is handled by the same fraudulent persons as those who are responsible for Womadsmart. At times, upon clicking to the pop-up ad, you might be thrown to another page that offers activating pop-up advertisements. The activity of multiple origins of pop-ups can transform your web browser into an outlet of a pop-up surge.

Womadsmart push notification

Womadsmart push notification.

Where did Womadsmart pop-ups come from?

The main and most common method to access the pop-up spamming site is to browse content on warez sites, pages containing pirated content, and the like. The individuals responsible for such dubious venues aim to counterbalance expenses via redirects, often as a promotional strategy. This type of redirection is commonly known as an “anti-bot verification”.

An additional plausible origin of pop-up advertisements is adware, currently active inside of your system. It alters browser settings in a manner so it begins displaying Womadsmart pop-ups without your consent. However, this circumstance is relatively infrequent, as such malware employs its own, more productive method to showcasing advertisements.

Are Womadsmart pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look harmless – just a colourful window that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-up ads. Womadsmart.com web page is ruled by fraudsters, who intendedly spread tons of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can make sporadic pop-ups into a hurricane of ads. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all troubles these pop-up notifications carry.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing that touches illegal advertising, Womadsmart pop-up advertisements don’t have legit offers. Even when hackers make the banners looking similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the website these banners will throw you to are completely different. And these pages can 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 pop-up ads 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, Womadsmart pop-ups are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Womadsmart pop-ups?

Reset your browsers manually

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

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).

References

  1. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.

About the author

Wilbur Woodham

Technical writer covering malware detections, unwanted programs, and browser-based threats. Wilbur turns research notes into step-by-step guides that Windows users can follow safely.

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