CoolNews2 Pop-up Ads Removal — How to Fix Your Browser?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
CoolNews2 push notifications appear when you do not expect, disturbing and irritating you. However, they are way more than annoying pop-ups – their origins is purely malignant, and they can introduce other malicious stuff to your PC. In this article, I will show you the guide how to remove CoolNews2 push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with CoolNews2 pop-up notifications will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the web pages it can open can introduce malware to your system. These pop-ups may also advertise 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.

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What are CoolNews2 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 CoolNews2 notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal push notifications are offered for you to enable with a straightforward purpose – notify you about the latest posts, discounts and so on. It is an effective approach to help your site to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested visitors to have the best deal.

Short summary of the Coolnews2.xyz pop-ups:
NameCoolnews2.xyz
HostingAS15317 Serverel Inc.
United States, Santa Clara
IP Address173.214.240.15
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorShopsalelogs3, Unatonse, Gawend
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

CoolNews2 pop-ups, on the other hand, have a deal with unlegit websites. You will commonly witness the offer to turn them on following the redirection from another website. Redirects are OK unless they throw you into such a dubious place. In this case, enabling pop-up notifications is served as the anti-DDoS check-up. In other cases, the sites can refuse to show you the contents unless you apply these pop-up ads. These theses should be the red flag, as sites generally feature a different anti-bot mechanism. Spectating such an demand should be the reason to leave the page doubtlessly. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not get to the site – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up notifications.

CoolNews2 push notification

CoolNews2 push notification.

How does this work?

Most of web browsers support enabling pop-ups from websites. Websites, on the other hand, may send notifications with the content they like. It may be an advertisement of the page listed on this website, or 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 direct you to website Y – because a referral link to the latter was built in.

Cyber burglars rely on this ability in their approach to gain money through advertising. They trick users into allowing the pop-ups, and after that just spread hundreds of ads of other crooks they have a deal with. As you may suppose, no legit companies will have a business with fraudsters. All the CoolNews2 notifications you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. At some point, the same victim can be trapped by 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 generally 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 much bigger sum. Despite most of such ads are ineffective, it can still give all the participants a lot of money.

Are CoolNews2 pop-ups dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they may look safe – just a colourful pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you used to see in push notifications. Coolnews2.xyz website is controlled by fraudsters, who deliberately spread tons of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any common sense and can launch sporadic push notifications into a hurricane of ads. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But troubles are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing that touches illegal ads, CoolNews2 pop-up advertisements don’t have legit offers. Even when hackers make the banners similar to ones from well-known retailers, the site these ads will throw you to are completely different. And these pages may 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, CoolNews2 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 CoolNews2 pop-ups?

Fortunately, CoolNews2 pop-up notifications removal is pretty easy. They sit in the browser and can’t hide themselves among system files. Nonetheless, as I stated above, some pop-ups can introduce malicious programs to your computer. It is hard to predict all cases, and manual malware removal is a poor idea. For that reason, after removing the source of the pop-up notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. That is especially recommended in the case when you have never allowed push notifications, but they still appeared. This situation may be a sign of malware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both system recovery and malware scanning purposes, because of its abilities of system recovery and multi-layer detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to accomplish in manual or automated way. The former, obviously, requires 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 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 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:


# 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 CoolNews2 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 CoolNews2 Pop-ups?

Name: CoolNews2

Description: CoolNews2 - 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 Coolnews2.xyz push notifications?” or “why do Coolnews2.xyz pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with CoolNews2 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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