Did you just get a pop-up from adstract.adk2.co and wonder where it came from? Did the adstract.adk2.co ad appear to have been popped up from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the adstract.adk2.co pop-up show up while you clicked a link on one of the big search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo?

Here is how the adstract.adk2.co ad looked like on my computer:

If you also see this on your system, you presumably have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the adstract.adk2.co ads. Don’t write angry emails to the site you were browsing, the ads are almost certainly not coming from them, but from the adware on your machine. I’ll try help you to remove the adstract.adk2.co pop-ups in this blog post.

I found the adstract.adk2.co pop-up on one of the lab machines where I have some adware running. I’ve talked about this in some of the previous blog posts. The adware was installed on purpose, and from time to time I check if something new has appeared, such as pop-up windows, new tabs in the browsers, injected ads on web site that usually don’t show advertisements, or if some new files have been saved to the hard-drive.

adstract.adk2.co resolves to the 54.230.16.101 IP address. adstract.adk2.co was created on 2013-10-01. adk2.co resolves to 104.197.10.209. According to DomainTools are adk2.net
and adpdx.com located on the same IP.

So, how do you remove the adstract.adk2.co pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the adstract.adk2.co ads I had istartsurf, MedPlayerNewVersion and Movie Wizard installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the adstract.adk2.co pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

The adstract.adk2.co domain is attracting quite a lot of traffic, just check out the Alexa traffic rank:

The problem with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware, not just the adware on my computer. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the adstract.adk2.co ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the adstract.adk2.co pop-ups is to examine the software installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can open 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 shady in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed about the same time as you started getting the adstract.adk2.co pop-ups.

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

I think you 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’ve developed since 2006. Freefixer is a tool built to manually find and uninstall unwanted software. When you’ve identified 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 won’t require you to pay for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having issues deciding if a file is safe or malware in FreeFixer’s 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 very useful:

Did this blog post help you to remove the adstract.adk2.co pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!