Ourcommonwords Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Ourcommonwords pop-ups appear when you do not expect, bothering and irritating you. However, they are slightly more than simple pop-ups – their essence is purely malicious, and they may bring other malware to your PC. In this post, I will guide you on how to remove Ourcommonwords pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Ourcommonwords push notifications will be ineffective at best. In worst case scenario, the sites it can show you may introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements may 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.

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What are Ourcommonwords 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 Ourcommonwords notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal pop-up notifications are offered for you to enable with a straightforward purpose – notify you about the new publications, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful tool to help your website to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested visitors to have the best price.

Brief description of the Ourcommonwords.com pop-ups:
Name Ourcommonwords.com
Hosting AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address 172.64.201.27
Malware type Adware1
Effect Unwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard level Medium
Malware source Apps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behavior Qasforsalesrepr, Myrrhisunition, Serasearchtop
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Ourcommonwords push notifications, in contrast, have a deal with untrustworthy sites. You will generally observe the proposition to enable them following the redirection from another page. It’s OK to see redirects unless it throws you into such a questionable place. In this case, enabling pop-ups is served as the anti-DDoS filtering. Alternatively, the websites may deny showing you the contents unless you enable these pop-up ads. These theses should already raise suspicion, as websites commonly have a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Seeing this requirement should be the reason to close the site doubtlessly. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not see the website – the sole page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-ups.

Ourcommonwords push notification

Ourcommonwords push notification.

How does this work?

The majority of web browsers support turning on push notifications from sites. Websites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content they like. It can be an advertisement of the page listed for sale on this site, or an ad of their partner page. As a result, you can see the push notification from site X, but opening it will redirect you to website Y – because a referral link to the latter was built in.

Cybercriminals bear on this ability in their approach to earn 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 can suppose, no normal companies will contract with fraudsters. All the Ourcommonwords push ads you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. In some cases, the same victim can be trapped by several pop-up spamming sites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The promotions these rascals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a miserable payment for one person, but when you can send ads to a huge number of users and make it hundreds of times every day – that is a much bigger sum. Despite the majority of such ads giving no result at all, it can still give all the participants a lot of money.

Are Ourcommonwords pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they may look safe – just a colourful window that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you generally see in push notifications. Ourcommonwords.com site is controlled by crooks, who intendedly spread hundreds of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic push notifications into a hurricane of ads. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all troubles these pop-ups carry.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing related to illegal ads, Ourcommonwords pop-ups do not contain any legit deals to offer. Even though crooks make the ads looking similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the web page these banners 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 pop-up advertisements 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, Ourcommonwords pop-ups are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Ourcommonwords pop-ups?

Fortunately, Ourcommonwords pop-ups removal is not very complicated. They reside in the web browser and can’t conceal themselves in the system. Nonetheless, as I pointed out above, some pop-up notifications can deliver malicious programs to your system. It is hard to describe all of the cases, and manual malware removal is a bad idea. Therefore, after getting rid of the pop-ups it is recommended to use anti-malware software. I’d especially recommend that in the case when you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up ads, but they still appeared. That may point at malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both system recovery and malware checkup purposes, thanks to its system recovery functionality and advanced detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to accomplish in both manual and automatic manner. The former, obviously, takes 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 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 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 Ourcommonwords 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 Ourcommonwords Pop-ups?

Name: Ourcommonwords

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