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

Written by Wilbur Woodham
AllCommonStories pop-ups appear when you do not expect, distracting and irritating you. However, they are much more than simple pop-up ads – their origins is surely malignant, and they can install other malware to your system. In this post, I will guide you on how to remove AllCommonStories push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with AllCommonStories push notifications will be useless at best. At worst, the web pages it can show you can introduce malware to your system. These push notifications can also promote fake 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.

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What are AllCommonStories pop-up notifications?

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 ads and AllCommonStories notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Common pop-up ads are offered for you to enable on different sites with a legitimate purpose – keep you aware about the new posts, goods for sale and so on. It is an effective approach to help your website to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested visitors to have the best price.

Brief summary of the Allcommonstories.com pop-up ads:
NameAllcommonstories.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address172.64.128.15
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorDatelinkage, Gasend, News
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

AllCommonStories pop-up advertisements, as opposed, have a deal with less legit sites. You will generally witness the proposition to enable them following the redirection from another website. Redirects are OK unless they throw you into such a questionable place. At that point, turning on pop-up ads is offered as the anti-bot check-up. Alternatively, the sites can refuse to show you the content unless you enable these pop-up notifications. These theses should already raise suspicion, as websites commonly have a different anti-bot mechanism. Spectating this offer should be the reason to leave the website right away. Sometimes, 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 push notifications.

AllCommonStories push notification

AllCommonStories push notification.

How does this work?

The vast majority of browsers support enabling pop-ups from sites. Sites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content of their choice. It can be an advertisement of the product or a page listed on this website, as well as a promotion of their partner page. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but interacting with it will direct you to site Y – because a referral link to that website was added.

Crooks bear on this ability in their attempt to gain money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing the pop-ups, and after that just spread hundreds of promotions of other crooks they have a deal with. As you can suppose, no image-caring companies will have a business with fraudsters. All the AllCommonStories popups you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. At some point, the same victim can be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming websites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a miserable payment for one viewer, but when you can send ads to a huge number of users and make it hundreds of times every day – that is a much more significant sum. Even though the majority of such ads giving no result at all, it can still bring all the parties a lot of profit.

Are AllCommonStories pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they can look safe – just a colourful pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you used to see in pop-up advertisements. Allcommonstories.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-ups into a hurricane of promotions. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all problems these pop-up advertisements carry.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing that touches illegal advertising, AllCommonStories pop-ups don’t have legit deals to offer. Even when crooks make the ads similar to ones from well-known retailers, the site 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-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, AllCommonStories pop-up ads are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove AllCommonStories pop-ups?

Fortunately, AllCommonStories pop-ups removal is pretty easy. They sit in the browser and can’t conceal themselves on a disk. Nonetheless, as I told above, some push notifications can promote malicious programs to your computer. It is hard to describe all of the cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a poor idea. For that reason, after removing the source of the pop-ups the best option is to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended in the case when you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up ads, but they still appeared. That can point at adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware scanning and removal purposes, thanks to its system recovery functionality and multi-component detection system.

First and foremost, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in manual or automated way. The former, obviously, takes more time to complete and may 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 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.

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 AllCommonStories 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 AllCommonStories Pop-ups?

Name: AllCommonStories

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

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