Remove Cousonelly Pop-up Virus — How to Remove?

Cousonelly pop-up alerts may appear out of the blue, covering the material of the page you went to or opening your web browser when you don’t need it to be opened.

Clicking on the Cousonelly promotion can result in the injection of various malware or unwanted programs. In this guide, you will see the guideline of Cousonelly popups clearing in a couple of manners, and also inspecting your computer for extra malware existence.

What are Cousonelly pop-ups?

Cousonelly popups are a consequence of adware action. Adware is a type of malware that presents you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click promotions, which produces a large amount of profit for adware distributors. These ads might have explicit composition, or have a link to malevolent content/website, considering that adware maintainers have no purpose to examine the goodness of the content they are going to show – their single target is cash.

Cousonelly push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is an excellent, cheap and also extremely effective advertising solution¹. It allows the seller to link the customers’ interest to their website, as well as the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they intend to buy. When the person will receive a pop-up notification that the TV set he wishes to buy is available at the online shop he/she saw previously with a 15% price cut, one will surely use this chance and purchase it. Considering the exceptionally low price for the popups and their targeting, such a marketing method is a much-loved thing amidst the marketing teams of huge online retailers.

Nevertheless, such a successful system could not be missed by virus creators. Ability to demonstrate the popup advertisements by force to the people of malware attack is an ideal basis for evil-minded adjustments with the popup advertisements. And Cousonelly.com ads is just one of hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a short info for the Cousonelly site

How have I got the Cousonelly virus?

There are a lot of methods of becoming contaminated by the adware that result in the Cousonelly popups tornado. A lion’s part of this malware incidents is after the free software or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Freeware can also be downloaded from the official web page, and the adware is delivered as a legit bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A number of individuals often utilize the unreliable programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, various tools that are free, and even hacked programs. All of these kinds of applications are dangerous, since it is quite easy to include a Cousonelly 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.

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

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

The manual of Cousonelly adware clearing contains 2 parts. Initially, we need to eliminate the malware, and after that repair the effects of its activity. The elimination procedure is really simple, since it may be executed even with making use of Microsoft Defender – security program that is available on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nonetheless, because of its substantial resources utilization, along with some defects that can be critical for some types of individuals, Defender is frequently turned off by the users, so its usage is likely impossible. In addition, various trojan viruses have the ability to switch off the embedded antivirus. It is better to make use of the separated program that will not have such weakness.

• 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.

• When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Cousonelly malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.

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. 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. In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option :

After choosing this option, you will see the next message :

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 ensure that your browser will be connected the accurate DNS while connecting to the site you need. Make a text file named “hosts” on your computer’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following content³:

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.

However, there is one problem that makes the things much more difficult to fix, especially without the anti-malware software. Most of adware variations that are used to show you the Cousonelly pop-up ads are adjusting the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to fix your browser settings after your PC was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly crash soon. In some cases, you will see no crash, however, huge lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 secs, and after that it will be back to the normal, up until you try to open settings once again.

1. More about pop-up ads on Wikipedia.
2. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.