Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from hlpnowp-c.com while browsing at web sites that in general don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to bypass the built-in pop-up blockers in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the hlpnowp-c.com pop-ups appear when clicking search results from a Google search? Or does the pop-ups show up even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s a screenshot of the hlpnowp-c.com pop-up ad when it showed up on my system:

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your system, you probably have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the hlpnowp-c.com ads. Contacting the owner of the web site would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the ads. I’ll try help you with the hlpnowp-c.com removal in this blog post.

Those that have been reading this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab machines and intentionally installed some adware programs on them. Since then I have been observing 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 auto-updates, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the computers. I first noticed the hlpnowp-c.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

hlpnowp-c.com resolves to 98.129.229.215. hlpnowp-c.com was registered on 2015-04-02.

So, how do you remove the hlpnowp-c.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the hlpnowp-c.com ads I had istartsurf,, Movie Wizard and MedPlayerNewVersion installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the hlpnowp-c.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

If you are wonder if there are many others out there also getting the hlpnowp-c.com ads, the answer is probably yes. Check out the traffic rank from Alexa:

The issue 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.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the hlpnowp-c.com ads removal:

1. Examine what programs you have installed in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel. Do you see something that you don’t remember installing or that was recently installed?
2. How about your add-ons you have in your browsers. Anything in the list that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that didn’t solve the problem, I’d recommend a scan with FreeFixer to manually track down the adware. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I’m working on that scans your computer at lots of locations, such as browser add-ons, processes, Windows services, recently modified files, etc. If you want to get additional details about a file in the scan result, you can click the More Info link for that file and a web page will open up with a VirusTotal report which will be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

   

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

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

Thank you!