Hello readers. Another day, another blog post. Did something called Hold Page appear on your system? This is a variant of CrossRider that I’ve written about many times before. If you have Hold Page installed on your machine, you will see new add-ons installed in Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. Nothing was installed in Google Chrome. I’ll show how to remove Hold Page in this blog post with the FreeFixer removal tool.
Hold Page is bundled with other software. Bundled means that it is included in another software’s installer. Generally, you can avoid bundled software such as Hold Page by being careful when installing software and declining the bundled offers in the installer and making sure that you have downloaded the software from the official site and not from some third party.
When I find some new bundled software I normally upload it to VirusTotal to verify if the anti-virus progams there detect something suspicious. 11 of the 55 scanners detected the file. The Hold Page files are detected as BrowseFox.F by AVG, Trojan.BPlug.215 by DrWeb and PUP.Optional.HoldPage.A by Malwarebytes.
If you would like to remove HoldPage you can do so with the FreeFixer removal tool. Here’s a few screengrabs from the removal that should help you: You may have to restart your computer to complete the removal.
Hope this helped you solved the HoldPage problem.
I stumbled upon Hold Page while testing out some downloads that are known to bundled lots of unwanted software. Any idea how Hold Page was installed on your machine? Please share your story the comments below. Thank you very much!
Thanks for reading. Welcome back!
I’m an older retired woman, with a background in computer tech support, so I am not exactly a novice at this. I have both Norton 360 and MalWareBytes installed on my system, and HP Pavillion with 12 MG of RAM and running Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium, with Service Pack 1. My browser of choice is Waterfox, because it gives me the best performance when playing my Flash intensive Zynga games.
I’m a fan of Zynga Farmville 2 and yesterday they inserted new ads in the game feed (where your posts for needed items go, and where you can get the same from other players). Some of these ads had video and sound and were very annoying, and slowed the game down considerably, caused freezes, etc. There was no way to turn them off. Muting the sound on the game had no effect on the ads. Playing the game in full screen (which prevents you from seeing the feed), did not eliminate the talking in the background.
I immediately submitted a bug report to Zynga as I am sure many others did as well.
After dealing with this annoyance for most of the day, a friend suggested downloading and installing a program called FlashBlock. I did a search and found it reviewed on C-Net. I had always found C-Net to be a reliable source of information and safe downloads in the past. The program sounded good so I clicked to download it. Well, first it made me download and install their Download Manager. Then when I tried to download the program, it kept asking me if I wanted PCFixer and a bunch of other programs, and I declined them all. It never did download the program I wanted so I left their site, went back to the search and saw that I could get it directly from Mozilla. Which I did, and installed it and it was working as promised. The ads were blocked but I was able to click the “F” and play the game. Because the game was still very sluggish I decided to restart my computer. Mind you, I clear cache often and also clear the Flash of all web sites and there were lots from all the Flash ads.
After restarting my PC, and trying to load the game, I was inundated with all kinds of things that prevented the game from loading. One, when I clicked the X to close it, caused a popup to appear saying that it was a Fake Web Site. PCFixer was telling me I needed to fix my computer that it had 100’s of bad files (ulikely since MalWareBytes and Norton do a pretty good job of catching everything. And it would only display Zynga in a list format, instead of loading the page. The Flash Block “F” on the page did not work either. Also when I tried to load Facebook, all I got was a list format and nothing would load.
Well by this time I was steaming mad because apparently all this crap downloaded to my PC without my permission and without going into the download tool that is part of Waterfox. The only thing I could think to do at this point was to do a system restore, which took me back to just prior to installing the software and it indicated that these programs (and it named them all) would be removed. Upon restarting after the system restore, those programs were gone, I no longer had their annoying ads etc, but I still could not load Zynga or Facebook. However I was able to do web searches and load other websites.
Then I checked my Norton and it indicated that my system was not protected because Norton Sonic was not working. I clicked the FIX tool but it was unable to FIX it and I found no help for this on the Norton support site. So there I was, my Waterfox no longer to load two favorite websites and Norton is broken. Something really bad had apparently invaded my PC along with all the other garbage.
I checked the Windows updates and found there were several I had not installed yet, including a high security update. So I told it to install them all and went to bed. This morning after restarting the PC, the Windows Updates apparently fixed the problem with Norton. But Waterfox was still broken. So I uninstalled both Waterfox and Adobe Flash and the Flash Player, restarted my PC again, and then installed the latest versions of both programs.
Then I did what I should have done in the first place. I installed the AdBlock app for Firefox — which works perfectly. I still might install the Flash Block, as I do not mind seeing some ads, and after they pay for the game and Facebook. But I really want to put an end to those Flash ads!
Well, now, MalWareBytes just completed its scan and came up with Hold Place files in my computer, Another Bing search and found out what it is, an Ad Server, UGH! I can’t see your ads anyway! but found your site. I have been letting MalwareBytes put all the associated files into quarantine. Should I use the Free Fix tool also ?
And I still need to notify C-Net that their download for Flash Block has been majorly hacked !!