AllWowWords pop-ups appear out of the blue, distracting and irritating you. Nonetheless, they are slightly more than annoying notifications – their essence is clearly malicious, and they can install other malicious stuff to your computer. In this article, I will show you the guide how to remove AllWowWords pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.
Any time you interact with AllWowWords push notifications will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the websites it can show you can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements 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.
What are AllWowWords 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-ups and AllWowWords pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal pop-ups are offered for you to enable with a understandable purpose – notify you about the fresh articles, discounts and so on. It is a useful tool to help your website to retain visitors and help the interested users to have the best deal.
Brief description of the Allwowwords.com pop-up ads:
Name | Allwowwords.com |
Hosting | AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc. United States, San Francisco |
IP Address | 188.114.96.3 |
Malware type | Adware1 |
Effect | Unwanted pop-up advertisements |
Hazard level | Medium |
Malware source | Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites |
Similar behavior | Top, 2coin, Popirs |
Removal method | To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC |
AllWowWords pop-up ads, in contrast, have a deal with untrustworthy web pages. You will commonly see the proposition to enable them after a redirection from another site. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless they throw you to such a questionable place. In this case, turning on pop-ups is offered under the guise of the anti-DDoS check-up. In other cases, the web pages may refuse to show you the content unless you apply these pop-up notifications. These demands should be the red flag, as sites commonly feature a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Spectating such an offer is a reason to close the page right away. Sometimes, even when you click “Allow”, you will not get to the website – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up ads.
How does it work?
The majority of web browsers support turning on push notifications from websites. Sites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content they like. It may be a promotion of the product published on this particular site, or a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you can see the push notification from site X, but clicking it will throw you to website Y – because a link to the latter was added.
Cyber burglars rely on this feature in their attempt to earn money using illegal advertising. They trick victims into allowing the pop-ups, and after that just spread hundreds of promotions of anyone they contract with. As you may suppose, no image-caring organisations will have a deal with fraudsters. All the AllWowWords notifications you may see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same victim can be trapped by several pop-up spamming websites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.
The ads these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a negligible payment for one viewer, but when you have hundreds of users and make it hundreds of times each day – that is a much more significant sum. Despite most of such ads giving no result at all, it can still bring all the parties a lot of profit.
Are AllWowWords pop-up advertisements dangerous?
Yes, they are. Initially, they may 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 used to see in pop-up advertisements. Allwowwords.com web page is controlled by crooks, who intendedly throw hundreds and thousands of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic pop-up advertisements into a storm of ads. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But problems are not over at this point.
As with any other thing related to illegal ads, AllWowWords pop-up ads don’t have legit deals to offer. Even when hackers make the banners looking 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-up 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, AllWowWords pop-up notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.
How to remove AllWowWords pop-ups?
Fortunately, AllWowWords pop-ups removal is not very complicated. They parasite in the web browser and cannot hide themselves on a disk. Nevertheless, as I stated above, some push notifications may introduce malicious software to your system. It is hard to describe all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a bad idea. For that reason, after removing the source of the pop-ups it is recommended to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that in the case when you have never allowed pop-up advertisements, but they still appeared. That may point at adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both system recovery and malware scanning and removal purposes, thanks to its system recovery functionality and multi-component detection system.
First of all, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to do in both manual and automatic manner. The former, obviously, requires 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:
- Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option:
- 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:
- Open Menu tab (three strips in upper right corner) and click the “Help” button. In the appeared menu choose “troubleshooting information”:
- In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:
After choosing this option, you will see the next message:
If you use Google Chrome
- Open Settings tab, find the “Advanced” button. In the extended tab choose the “Reset and clean up” button:
- In the appeared list, click on the “Restore settings to their original defaults”:
- 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
- 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:
- 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 site 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 AllWowWords 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 AllWowWords Pop-ups?
Name: AllWowWords
Description: AllWowWords - 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 Allwowwords.com push notifications?” or “why do Allwowwords.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with AllWowWords 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
User Review
( votes)References
- More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
- Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.