Remove Consumerlyst Pop-up Virus — How to Remove?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Consumerlyst pop-up advertisements appear when you do not expect, distracting and irritating you. Nonetheless, that is way more than annoying notifications – their nature is surely malicious, and they may introduce other malware to your computer. In this article, I will show you the guide how to remove Consumerlyst pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Consumerlyst push notifications will be useless at best. At worst, the websites it can show you may introduce malware to your system. These pop-up notifications can also advertise fake online shopping sites 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 Consumerlyst pop-ups?

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 Consumerlyst notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Common push notifications are offered for you to enable with a straightforward purpose – keep you aware about the latest publications, goods for sale and so on. It is an effective approach to help your website to keep visitors and help the interested visitors to have the best deal.

Short summary of the Consumerlyst.com pop-ups:
NameConsumerlyst.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address172.67.136.73
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorAdvmonie, Adrgyounow, News
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Consumerlyst push notifications, as opposed, are related to unlegit web pages. You will commonly observe the proposition to enable them following the redirection from another page. Redirects are OK unless they throw you into such a questionable place. In this case, turning on pop-up advertisements is offered as the anti-DDoS filtering. In other cases, the websites can refuse to show you the contents unless you enable these pop-up notifications. These requirements should be the red flag, as websites generally feature a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing such an demand is a reason to skip the page doubtlessly. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the web page – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up advertisements.

Consumerlyst push notification

Consumerlyst push notification.

How does it work?

The vast majority of browsers support turning on pop-ups from sites. Websites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content they want. It can be an advertisement of the page posted on this site, as well as a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you can see the pop-up from site X, but interacting with it will redirect you to website Y – because a referral link to the latter was built in.

Scoundrels bear on this ability in their attempt to earn money using illegal advertising. They trick victims into allowing them to show the banners, and then just spread numerous ads of anyone they contract with. As you may suppose, no benevolent companies will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Consumerlyst popups you may see lead to other fraudulent sites. In some cases, the same user can be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming sites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The promotions these criminals 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 show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a way bigger sum. Despite the majority of these ads giving no result at all, it can still bring all the parties a lot of money.

Are Consumerlyst pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they may look non-threatening – just a colourful pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-ups. Consumerlyst.com website is controlled by crooks, who deliberately throw hundreds of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic push notifications into a storm of banners. For weak computers, that may be enough to make the system slower. But problems are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing related to illegal advertising, Consumerlyst pop-up advertisements do not contain any legit offers. Even though crooks make the ads looking similar to ones from well-known retailers, the web page 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, Consumerlyst pop-ups are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Consumerlyst pop-ups?

Fortunately, Consumerlyst pop-up advertisements removal is pretty easy. They reside in the web browser and cannot hide themselves among system files. However, as I told above, some pop-up notifications may promote malicious programs to your computer. It is nearly impossible to show all of the cases, and manual malware removal is a bad idea. Thus, after getting rid of the pop-up notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. This step is especially recommended if you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up ads, and they still appeared. This situation may point at malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware checkup purposes, thanks to its abilities of system recovery and advanced detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that 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.

Tools tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

You can 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 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 Consumerlyst 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 Consumerlyst Pop-ups?

Name: Consumerlyst

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