Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from f54d6bf2b1.se while browsing on websites that usually don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop ups manage to evade the built-in pop-up blockers in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Maybe the f54d6bf2b1.se pop-ups show up when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s how the f54d6bf2b1.se pop-up looked like when I got it on my computer:

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your system, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the f54d6bf2b1.se ads. There’s no use contacting the owners of the website you were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the f54d6bf2b1.se removal in this blog post.

Those that have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Recently I dedicated some of my lab systems and intentionally installed some adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been tracking the behaviour on these machines to see what kinds of ads that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware updates itself automatically, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the machines. I first found the f54d6bf2b1.se pop-up on one of these lab systems.

f54d6bf2b1.se resolves to 80.252.188.228. f54d6bf2b1.se was registered on 2013-02-22.

So, how do you remove the f54d6bf2b1.se pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the f54d6bf2b1.se ads I had Browser Warden, BlockAndSurf and TinyWallet installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the f54d6bf2b1.se pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

Judging from Alexa’s traffic rank, f54d6bf2b1.se is getting quite a lot of traffic:

The issue with this type of pop-up is that it can be initiated by many variants of adware, not just the adware on my machine. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

So, what can be done? To remove the f54d6bf2b1.se pop-up ads you need to examine 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 f54d6bf2b1.se pop-ups is to examine the software installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can reach 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 dubious listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed approximately about the same time as you started getting the f54d6bf2b1.se pop-ups.

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

I think most users will be able to track down and uninstall 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 started develop many years ago. Freefixer is a tool built to manually identify and remove unwanted software. When you’ve tracked down 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 locked like many other removal tools out there. It will not require you to purchase the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having a hard time deciding if a file is clean or unsafe in the FreeFixer scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains more details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:

Here you can see FreeFixer in action removing the adware that caused pop-up ads:

Did this blog post help you to remove the f54d6bf2b1.se pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!