How to remove Story-board.co pop-ups? — Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Story-board.co pop-up alerts can show up unexpectedly, covering the content of the page you visited or opening your web browser when you don’t need it to be opened.

Clicking the Story-board.co promotion can trigger the injection of other malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the tutorial of Story-board.co popups clearing in multiple ways, as well as checking your computer for other viruses existence.

GridinSoft Anti-Malware Review
It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!
Removing Story-board.co manually may take hours and may damage your PC in the process. I recommend you to download GridinSoft Anti-Malware for threats removal. Allows to complete scan and cure your PC during the trial period.
Gridinsoft Anti-Malware 6-day trial available.
EULA | Privacy Policy | 10% Off Coupon
Subscribe to our Telegram channel to be the first to know about news and our exclusive materials on information security.

What are Story-board.co pop-ups?

Story-board.co popups are a consequence of adware presence. Adware is a sort of malware that presents you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click ads, which creates a substantial volume of profit for adware suppliers. These ads may contain sometimes shocking information, or have a web link to malevolent content/website, considering that adware maintainers have no purpose to check the goodness of the material they are going to show – their solitary target is cash.

Story-board.co push notification

Story-board.co push notification.

Pop-up advertising itself is a good, affordable and really productive marketing tool1. It makes it possible for the seller to link the customers’ attention to their site, and the buyers to get the dynamic updates on the goods they want to purchase. When the person will receive a pop-up alert that the TV set he likes to buy is provided at the online shop he/she visited previously with a 15% discount, one will surely use this chance and purchase it. Taking into consideration the exceptionally small cost for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising and marketing tool is a much-loved thing amidst the marketing departments of large internet stores.

However, such a profitable scheme could not be missed by virus developers. Option to show the popup advertisements forcibly to the targets of malware attack is an ideal basis for malevolent adjustments with the popup promotions. And Story-board.co ads is just one of hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a short summary for the Story-board.co site
SiteStory-board.co
HostingAS14061 DigitalOcean, LLC
Germany, Frankfurt am Main
Infection TypeAdware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address104.248.47.162
SymptomsAnnoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behaviorNews, Urretyequirements, Wholeactualnewz
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Story-board.co virus?

There are a number of methods of getting contaminated by the adware that create the Story-board.co popups tornado. A lion’s part of this computer virus instances is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are spread on the peering networks. Free software can also be downloaded from the official website, and the adware is provided as a legitimate bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A lot of people regularly use the dubious programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, a wide range of apps that are free, and even hacked programs. All of these sorts of applications are unsafe, due to the fact that it is quite easy to integrate a Story-board.co 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.

Story-board.co popup malware may likewise be concealed in the ad somewhere on the strange web page. Such web pages are typically loaded with bright and blinking advertisements, and their proprietors usually accept any type of promos to be posted on their page. Thus, clicking such banners is a risky thing: only the ad provider realizes what will happen when you press this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you can likewise receive something far more hazardous, like ransomware or coin miner; the large share of coin miners distribution is exactly after the malicious promotions.

People dislike popups

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

Potentially undesirable applications, like Story-board.co pop-up virus can provoke a variety of different problems on your PC. Distracting is not the single problem – pop-up notifications can display you the promotions, where you are offered to get another dubious application, or “a amazing anti-malware tool”. Scareware is often distributed with the last slogun. Potentially undesirable applications, in turn, may have spyware functions. And it is very hard to distinguish the undesirable app from a legit one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the potentially unwanted programs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related banners are also exploited as a spreading way by different trojan viruses, for example – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such viruses is 100% unpleasant, and can cost you several hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not interacting with these banners, they may be clicked by whoever who also makes use of your PC – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation may become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without data and money loss. It is recommended to get rid of the viruses with anti-malware applications as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Story-board.co pop-up advertisements?

The tutorial of Story-board.co adware elimination consists of 2 sections. First, we need to remove the malware, and then fix the consequences of its activity. The removal process is very simple, since it can be performed even with using Microsoft Defender – security tool that is present on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, because of its large resources utilization, along with some problems that may be serious for some groups of individuals, Defender is often disabled by the users, so its utilization is probably impossible. Moreover, a variety of trojan viruses can disable the embedded antivirus. It is better to make use of the separated program that will not have such vulnerabilities.

I’d suggest you to use Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven anti-malware tool that will surely eliminate the viruses from your PC and also make an impenetrable cover with a Proactive protection function. However, let’s manage Story-board.co adware initially.

Removing Story-board.co popup virus with GridinSoft Anti-Malware

  • Download and install GridinSoft Anti-Malware. After the installation, you will be offered to perform the Standard Scan. Approve this action.
  • Gridinsoft Anti-Malware during the scan process

  • 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.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware scan results

  • When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Story-board.co malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware - After Cleaning

Now, when the computer is clean of viruses, we can proceed to the browser reset. You can do this step manually, as well as with the use of GridinSoft Anti-Malware.

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. 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 web browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your web browser will connect the appropriate DNS while connecting to the website you need. Create a text file named “hosts” on your desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following text3:

# 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.

Nonetheless, there is one trouble that makes the things much harder to fix, especially without the anti-malware program. A lot of adware variations that are used to show you the Story-board.co pop-up advertisements are modifying the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to change your browser settings after your machine was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly crash quickly. Sometimes, you will see no crash, but large lag spike after pushing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 secs, and after that it will be back to the normal, till you try to open settings once again.

Reset your browser settings 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 the options for each browser. By default, they are set up in the manner which 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 last is also able to reset the HOSTS file without any additional commands.

How to Remove Story-board.co Pop-ups?

Name: Story-board.co

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

Sending
User Review
3.5 (4 votes)
Comments Rating 0 (0 reviews)

References

  1. More about pop-up ads on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware overview and also the reasons why I advise it for malware removal.
  3. 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.

Leave a Reply

Sending