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Word Surfer Ads

Posted: July 17, 2015

Threat Metric

Ranking: 10,471
Threat Level: 2/10
Infected PCs: 7,068
First Seen: July 10, 2015
Last Seen: October 6, 2023
OS(es) Affected: Windows

Word Surfer is an adware-related plugin, which may ruin your online experience with some intrusive ads. The program has very limited functionality. All it does is to allow the client to search for additional information about a particular word by highlighting it. This feature saves no more than a few seconds but comes at a rather high cost. According to the developers of Word Surfer, they need to display some ads to cover their expenses as their product is freeware. In fact, the main purpose of the adware is to create commercial content. The promise to enhance the searching process just tries to promote the installation of Word Surfer. When it reaches your PC, the suspicious add-on hooks towards all available browsers, including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. After that, it generates large amounts of pop-ups, banners, in-text ads and even interstitial ads that cover the whole site. The adware may also replace your homepage with a low-quality search engine, which displays sponsored links. The impact of these marketing materials on your web clients may be highly negative. The process of loading the ads happens thanks to the resources of your PC, and may result in speed drops. The sponsored links are not perceived as safe because they may sometimes lead to phishing sites or other dangerous platforms. If the modifications made by Word Surfer bother you, you should remove the adware immediately.

Technical Details

File System Modifications

Tutorials: If you wish to learn how to remove malware components manually, you can read the tutorials on how to find malware, kill unwanted processes, remove malicious DLLs and delete other harmful files. Always be sure to back up your PC before making any changes.

The following files were created in the system:



%SYSTEMDRIVE%\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp\nsk420A.tmp File name: nsk420A.tmp
Size: 1.17 MB (1172712 bytes)
MD5: 7008f657bbba3bf6625859dc4e507d67
Detection count: 66
File type: Temporary File
Mime Type: unknown/tmp
Path: %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp\nsk420A.tmp
Group: Malware file
Last Updated: September 2, 2022

Registry Modifications

The following newly produced Registry Values are:

Regexp file mask%WINDIR%\system32\Drivers\wsafd_1_10_0_[RANDOM CHARACTERS].sys%WINDIR%\System32\Tasks\WordSurfer Auto Updater[RANDOM CHARACTERS]HKEY..\..\..\..{RegistryKeys}SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Tracing\WordSurferAutoUpdateClient_RASAPI32SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Tracing\WordSurferAutoUpdateClient_RASMANCSSOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Tracing\WordSurferAutoUpdateClient_RASAPI32SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Tracing\WordSurferAutoUpdateClient_RASMANCS
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