Aboutsmartcook Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Aboutsmartcook pop-ups appear when you do not expect, distracting and annoying you. However, they are slightly more than just notifications – their essence is surely malicious, and they can install other malware to your computer. In this post, I will show you how to remove Aboutsmartcook pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Aboutsmartcook pop-ups will be ineffective at best. At worst, the websites it can throw you to may introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements may 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.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

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What are Aboutsmartcook pop-up advertisements?

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 advertisements and Aboutsmartcook notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal pop-up advertisements are offered for you to enable on different sites with a legitimate purpose – keep you aware about the new articles, discounts and so on. It is a useful thing to help your site to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested ones to have the best price.

Brief summary of the Aboutsmartcook.com pop-ups:

Aboutsmartcook pop-ups, as opposed, are related to unlegit websites. You will commonly see the proposition to turn them on following the redirection from another page. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless they throw you to such a dubious place. In this case, turning on pop-up ads is offered under the guise of the anti-DDoS check-up. In other cases, the websites can refuse to show you the content unless you enable these pop-ups. These requirements should already raise suspicion, as websites usually feature a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Spectating this offer should be the reason to leave the site doubtlessly. Sometimes, even when you click “Allow”, you will not get to the site – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up notifications.

Aboutsmartcook push notification.

How does this work?

The majority of browsers support turning on pop-ups from websites. Websites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content of their choice. It can be a promotion of the page published on this website, or a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but opening it will redirect you to site Y – because a referral link to the latter was built in.

Scoundrels bear on this ability in their approach to gain money through advertising. They trick victims into turning on pop-ups, and after that just spread hundreds of banners of anyone they have a deal with. As you can suppose, no normal companies will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Aboutsmartcook notifications you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same victim may get into a trap of several pop-up spamming websites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a miserable commission for one viewer, but when you have hundreds of users and make it hundreds of times every day – that is a way bigger sum. Even though the majority of these ads giving no result at all, it may still give all the participants a lot of profit.

Are Aboutsmartcook pop-up ads dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they can look non-threatening – just a colourful pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you generally see in push notifications. Aboutsmartcook.com site is ruled by fraudsters, who intendedly show hundreds of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can launch sporadic pop-up ads into a hurricane of banners. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But problems are not over at this point.

As with any other thing that touches illegal ads, Aboutsmartcook push notifications lack legit offers. Even when crooks make the ads similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, 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 push notifications 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, Aboutsmartcook pop-up advertisements are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Aboutsmartcook pop-ups?

Fortunately, Aboutsmartcook pop-up notifications removal is pretty easy. They sit in the browser and cannot conceal themselves in the system. Nonetheless, as I told above, some pop-up advertisements can deliver malware to your computer. It is nearly impossible to predict all of the cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a poor idea. For that reason, after removing the source of the pop-up advertisements the best option is to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended if you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up ads, but they still appeared. That may point at malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware removal purposes, thanks to its system recovery functionality and multi-component detection system.

Initially, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in manual or automated way. 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.

You may 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.

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. 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 browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your browser will connect the right DNS while connecting to the web page you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following lines²:

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 Aboutsmartcook 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.

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).

How to Remove Aboutsmartcook Pop-ups?

Name: Aboutsmartcook

Description: Aboutsmartcook - 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 Aboutsmartcook.com push notifications?” or “why do Aboutsmartcook.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Aboutsmartcook 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 this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
2. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.