Remove Wholecoolstories.com Virus — How to Fix Guide

Wholecoolstories.com pop-up alerts may appear unexpectedly, covering the post of the site you visited or opening your browser when you do not need it to be opened.

Clicking the Wholecoolstories.com promotion can lead to the injection of other malware or unwanted programs. In this post, you will see the manual of Wholecoolstories.com popups clearing in various ways, and also checking your personal computer for other viruses presence.

What are Wholecoolstories.com pop-ups?

Quick reference

When comparing the prices of these services on average for an average Canadian man on the Internet in the United States, the most common price difference between US$10.99 (in Canada) and US$20.99 (in the United Kingdom) is between $3.99 and $6.19, which gives a discount on US$20.99, which also translates to a 20% discount.

A typical Canadian who has a couple of TV shows on his TV, as well as a couple of movies available on a variety of streaming services, may be more willing to invest to have a good pop-up alert, while an average US$20.99 user may be willing to take an active part in the promotion via his Youtube, Apple TV, Android phone or other devices.

Wholecoolstories.com popups are an outcome of adware presence. Adware is a type of malware that suggests you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click promotions, which produces a significant volume of earnings for adware suppliers. These ads may have explicit information, or have a link to malevolent content/website, due to the fact that adware maintainers have no reason to check the goodness of the material they are going to show – their solitary target is cash.

Wholecoolstories.com push notification

Wholecoolstories.com push notification.

Pop-up advertising itself is a very good, affordable and also very effective marketing method1. It permits the seller to link the customers’ attention to their site, as well as the buyers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they wish to purchase. When the customer will get a pop-up alert that the TV set he wishes to purchase is offered at the online shop he/she saw earlier with a 15% price cut, one will definitely use this possibility and get it. Considering the incredibly small cost for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising method is a favorite thing among the marketing departments of large internet stores.

Nonetheless, such a rewarding strategy could not be missed by virus creators. Option to demonstrate the popup ads forcibly to the victims of malware attack is a perfect basis for evil-minded tricks with the popup promotions. And Wholecoolstories.com advertisements is among hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a details for the Wholecoolstories.com site
Site Wholecoolstories.com
Hosting AS9002 RETN Limited
Netherlands, Amsterdam
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 139.45.197.161
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior Hishand, News, Storemost
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Wholecoolstories.com virus?

There are a lot of methods of getting infected by the adware that result in the Wholecoolstories.com popups storm. A lion’s part of this malware instances is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Free software may also be downloaded from the official site, and the adware is offered as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A lot of people frequently use the unreliable programs from untrusted sources: abandonware, various tools that are free of cost, and even hacked programs. Every one of these sorts of software are unsafe, since it is extremely easy to integrate a Wholecoolstories.com malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm within the Windows optimization tool.

People dislike popups

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

How can I get rid of Wholecoolstories.com pop-up advertisements?

The tutorial of Wholecoolstories.com adware elimination includes 2 parts. Initially, we need to get rid of the malware, and afterwards deal with the consequences of its activity. The removal process is pretty simple, because it can be executed even with using Microsoft Defender – anti-virus program that is available on all computers with Windows 8/10. Nevertheless, due to its huge resources consumption, along with some errors that can be serious for some types of users, Defender is oftentimes turned off by the users, so its usage is probably impossible. What’s more, different trojan viruses are capable to disable the embedded antivirus. It is much better to make use of the separated program that will not have such vulnerabilities.

    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 Wholecoolstories.com malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware - After Cleaning

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 browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your web browser will connect the appropriate DNS while connecting to the web page you want. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then 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.

However, there is one issue that makes things a lot harder to repair, particularly without the anti-malware program. The majority of adware variants that are utilized to show you the Wholecoolstories.com pop-up advertisements are changing the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to fix your browser settings after your system was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly collapse soon. In some cases, you will see no crash, however, significant lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 secs, and then it will be back to the normal, till you attempt to open settings once more.

References

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

About the author

Wilbur Woodham

Technical writer covering malware detections, unwanted programs, and browser-based threats. Wilbur turns research notes into step-by-step guides that Windows users can follow safely.

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