Does this sound like what you are seeing right now? You see pop-up advertisements from cdncache-a.akamaihd.net while browsing web sites that in general don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The popups manage to get round the built-in pop-up blockers in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Maybe the cdncache-a.akamaihd.net pop-ups appear when clicking search results from the Google search engine? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s how the cdncache-a.akamaihd.net pop-up looked like when I got it on my computer in a new tab:

The URL mentions the clkmon.com domain.

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your computer, you presumably have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the cdncache-a.akamaihd.net ads. So there’s no use contacting the site owner. The adverts are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you remove the cdncache-a.akamaihd.net pop-up in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: A little while back I dedicated some of my lab systems and deliberately installed some adware programs on them. I have been observing the behaviour on these machines to see what kinds of advertisements that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware updates itself automatically, or if it downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the machines. I first found the cdncache-a.akamaihd.net pop-up on one of these lab systems.

So, how do you remove the cdncache-a.akamaihd.net pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the cdncache-a.akamaihd.net ads I had TinyWallet, BlockAndSurf and TinyWallet installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the cdncache-a.akamaihd.net pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

In my case, TinyWallet was probably responsible for the cdncache-a.akamaihd.net connection as you can see from the network log:

The bad news with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be launched by many variants of adware. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

To remove the cdncache-a.akamaihd.net pop-up ads you need to check your computer for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

The first thing I would do to remove the cdncache-a.akamaihd.net pop-ups is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can find this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows you can just type in “uninstall” in the Control Panel’s search field to find that dialog:

Click on the “Uninstall a program” link and the Uninstall programs dialog will open up:

Do you see something suspicious listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed approximately about the same time as you started getting the cdncache-a.akamaihd.net pop-ups.

Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often show up under the add-ons dialog in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think you will be able to identify and remove the adware with the steps outlined above, but in case that did not work you can try the FreeFixer removal tool to identify and remove the adware. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I’ve developed since 2006. Freefixer is a tool designed to manually find and remove unwanted software. When you’ve found the unwanted files you can simply tick a checkbox and click on the Fix button to remove the unwanted file.

FreeFixer’s removal feature is not crippled like many other removal tools out there. It will not require you to pay a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having difficulties figuring out if a file is legit or adware in FreeFixer’s scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your browser with a page which contains more information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:

Here’s a video tutorial on how to remove the pop-ups with FreeFixer:

Did this blog post help you to remove the cdncache-a.akamaihd.net popup ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!