Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from super-promo.douc.info while browsing sites that normally don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to get round the built-in pop-up blockers in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Maybe the super-promo.douc.info pop ups show up when clicking search results from a Google search? Or does the pop-ups show up even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s how the super-promo.douc.info pop-up looked like when I got it on my machine:

(I’m sorry for the many watermarks. If I don’t add them, the screenshot always show up at some copy-cat blogs.)

The title of the pop up is “2015 Annual Visitor Survey“.

If this description sounds like your computer, you probably have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the super-promo.douc.info ads. Contacting the site owner would be a waste of time. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you to remove the super-promo.douc.info pop-ups in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: Some time ago I dedicated some of my lab machines and knowingly installed a few adware programs on them. I’ve been tracking the behaviour on these systems to see what kinds of adverts that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware updates itself automatically, or if it installs additional unwanted software on the machines. I first noticed the super-promo.douc.info pop-up on one of these lab machines.

super-promo.douc.info resolves to the 199.59.243.120 IP address and iifzz.super-promo.douc.info to the same IP. super-promo.douc.info was registered on 2015-04-11.

So, how do you remove the super-promo.douc.info pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the super-promo.douc.info ads I had istartsurf, MedPlayerNewVersion and Movie Wizard installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the super-promo.douc.info 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 super-promo.douc.info ads, the answer is probably yes. Check out the traffic rank from Alexa:

The issue with this type of pop-up 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 super-promo.douc.info ads removal:

1. Check what programs you have installed in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel. Do you see anything that you don’t remember installing or that was recently installed?
2. How about your add-ons that you have in your browser. 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 you can see FreeFixer in action removing the adware that caused pop-up ads:

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the super-promo.douc.info ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!