Remove Wounden Pop-up Virus — How to Remove?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Wounden pop-up notifications appear when you do not expect, bothering and annoying you. Nonetheless, that is much more than simple pop-ups – their essence is clearly malicious, and they can bring other malicious stuff to your device. In this post, I will show you the guide how to remove Wounden pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Wounden pop-ups will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the pages it can open can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up notifications can also promote fake online 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.

GridinSoft Anti-Malware Review
It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!
Removing Wounden 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 Wounden pop-ups?

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-up notifications and Wounden pop-ups is the malignant origins of the latter. Common push notifications are offered for you to enable on different sites with a understandable purpose – notify you about the fresh posts, goods for sale and so on. It is an effective approach to help your site to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested visitors to have the best price.

Short summary of the Wounden.com pop-up ads:
NameWounden.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address104.21.58.214
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorAbdoser, News, Totadblock
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Wounden pop-up ads, in contrast, are related to untrustworthy web pages. You will commonly see the offer to enable them following the redirection from another site. It’s OK to see redirects unless it throws you to such a questionable place. At that point, turning on push notifications is offered as the anti-bot check-up. In other cases, the sites can refuse to show you the content unless you apply these pop-up notifications. These requirements should be the red flag, as websites generally have a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Spectating such an offer is a reason to leave the website right away. 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 advertisements.

Wounden push notification

Wounden push notification.

How does this work?

The vast majority of browsers support turning on push notifications from websites. Websites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content they like. It may be an advertisement of the product listed for sale on this particular site, or a promotion of their partner page. As a result, you can see the push notification from site X, but clicking it will direct you to website Y – because a link to the latter was built in.

Cyber burglars bear on this feature in their attempt to earn money through advertising. They trick users into allowing the pop-ups, and then just spread numerous ads of other crooks they contract with. As you can suppose, no benevolent companies will contract with fraudsters. All the Wounden popups you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. At some point, the same victim can get into a trap of multiple pop-up spamming sites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The promotions these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It generally provides a negligible commission for one view, but when you have hundreds of victims and make it hundreds of times every day – that is a much more significant sum. Despite the majority of such banners are ineffective, it may still bring all the participants a lot of money.

Are Wounden pop-ups dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they may look harmless – just a colourful pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-ups. Wounden.com web page is ruled by crooks, who intentionally show hundreds and thousands of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can make sporadic pop-up advertisements into a storm of promotions. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But problems are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing related to illegal ads, Wounden pop-up notifications lack legit deals to offer. Even when hackers make the ads looking similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the site these ads 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-ups 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, Wounden push notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Wounden pop-ups?

Fortunately, Wounden pop-ups removal is not very complicated. They reside in the browser and can’t conceal themselves among system files. Nonetheless, as I told before, some push notifications can promote malware to your system. It is nearly impossible to predict all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a bad idea. Therefore, after getting rid of the pop-ups it is recommended to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended if you have never allowed pop-ups, but they still appeared. This situation can point at malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both system recovery and malware scanning and removal purposes, thanks to its abilities of system recovery and multi-layer detection system.

Initially, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in both manual and automatic manner. The former, obviously, takes 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 Wounden 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 Wounden Pop-ups?

Name: Wounden

Description: Wounden - 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 Wounden.com push notifications?” or “why do Wounden.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Wounden 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
3.6 (5 votes)
Comments Rating 0 (0 reviews)

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.

Leave a Reply

Sending