Adstomy Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Adstomy pop-up alerts may appear unexpectedly, covering the subject of the page you went to or opening your web browser when you don’t want it to be opened.

Clicking on the Adstomy promotion can lead to the injection of different malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the guide of Adstomy popups removal in several manners, and also inspecting your computer for additional malware presence.

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

Adstomy popups are a consequence of adware action. Adware is a sort of malware that demonstrates to you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click promotions, which produces a substantial volume of earnings for adware suppliers. These advertisements might have explicit material, or have a link to malicious content/website, due to the fact that adware maintainers have no purpose to check the goodness of the web content they are going to show – their solitary target is money.

Adstomy push notification

Adstomy push notification.

Pop-up promotions itself is a very good, affordable and very effective marketing solution1. It allows the vendor to attach the buyers’ interest to their site, as well as the customers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they wish to buy. When the customer will get a pop-up alert that the TV set he desires to purchase is provided at the online store he/she checked out earlier with a 15% price cut, one will definitely use this possibility and get it. Taking into consideration the incredibly small cost for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising method is a much-loved thing amidst the marketing teams of huge internet sellers.

However, such a successful strategy could not be missed by virus creators. Ability to show the popup ads by force to the people of malware attack is a great basis for malicious adjustments with the popup advertisements. And Adstomy.com ads is one of hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a info for the Adstomy
Site Adstomy.com
Hosting AS14618 Amazon.com, Inc.
United States, Ashburn
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 52.207.184.90
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior Tionandas, Speedcaptcha, Safepc
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Adstomy virus?

There are a plenty of ways of getting infected by the adware that create the Adstomy popups storm. A lion’s part of this virus instances is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Freeware may additionally be downloaded from the main website, and the adware is offered as a legit bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A number of users often utilize the unreliable programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, various apps that are free of cost, or even hacked programs. All of these kinds of programs are dangerous, because it is quite simple to include a Adstomy malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Adstomy popup malware may also be hidden in the ad somewhere on the unusual web page. Such websites are in most cases full of bright and blinking ads, and their owners often accept any kind of promotions to be placed on their web page. Therefore, clicking such banners is a shot in the dark: only the advertisement contractor knows what will happen when you click this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or unwanted programs, you may likewise receive something much more unsafe, like ransomware or coin miner; the big share of coin miners distribution is exactly after the malicious promotions.

People dislike popups

The statistic shows that people dislike popup advertising more than other types of promotions

Potentially unwanted applications, like Adstomy popup virus may provoke a lot of different troubles on your personal computer. Distracting is not the only effect – pop-up notifications may show you the advertisements, where you are offered to download one more strange program, or “a perfect security tool”. Scareware is usually distributed under the last motto. Potentially unwanted applications, in turn, may have spyware functions. And it is quite hard to distinguish the undesirable app from a legit one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related banners are also exploited as a spreading method by various trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of actions of such viruses is 100% unwanted, and can cost you hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not tapping these promotions, they can be clicked by whoever who also uses your PC – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the things can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to deal with it without data loss. It is recommended to remove the viruses with antivirus applications as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Adstomy pop-up advertisements?

The tutorial of Adstomy adware elimination consists of 2 sections. First, we need to exterminate the malware, and afterwards fix the effects of its action. The removal task is really easy, due to the fact that it can be performed even with making use of Microsoft Defender – anti-virus software that is available on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. However, due to its huge resources usage, as well as some failures that may be serious for some kinds of users, Defender is frequently turned off by the users, so its use is probably impossible. Additionally, various trojan viruses are capable to turn off the embedded antivirus. It is better to make use of the separated program that will not have such vulnerabilities.

I would certainly advise you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven antivirus tool that will definitely remove the viruses from your PC and also create an impenetrable shield with a Proactive protection feature. However, let’s take care of Adstomy adware initially.

Removing Adstomy 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 Adstomy 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 web browsers are reset, you need to make sure that your web browser will be connected the right DNS while connecting to the site you need. Create a text file named “hosts” on your computer’s desktop, then 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 problem that makes things much harder to fix, particularly without the anti-malware program. The majority of adware variations that are utilized to show you the Adstomy pop-up advertisements are altering the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to fix your browser settings after your computer was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly collapse quickly. Sometimes, you will see no crash, but huge lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 secs, and afterwards it will be back to the typical, until you attempt to open settings one more time.

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 Adstomy Pop-ups?

Name: Adstomy

Description: Adstomy - 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 Adstomy.com push notifications?” or “why do Adstomy.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Adstomy 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
3.4 (5 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