Did you just get interrupted by a pop-up ad from fugdownload128.com, fugdownload129.com or fugdownload130.com? You are not alone. I also get the fugdownload128.com pop-ups while browsing. Do the pop-ups also find a way round the pop-up blocker in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Then read on…
Here is how the fugdownload128.com ad looked like on my machine:
(I know, lots of watermarks. Have to do it to stop the copy-cats.)
As you can see the site claims that my “Java is out of date” and that it “does not include the latest security updates and has been blocked“. This is of course false.
If this description sounds like your story, you probably have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the fugdownload128.com ads. Don’t write angry emails to the website you were browsing, the adverts are apparently not coming from them, but from the adware on your system. I’ll try help you to remove the fugdownload***.com pop-ups in this blog post.
I found the fugdownload128.com pop-up on one of the lab computers 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 website that usually don’t show ads, or if some new files have been saved to the hard-drive.
fugdownload128.com was created on 2015-10-19. It’s protected by WHOISGUARD, INC. fugdownload128.com resolves to 104.31.67.50. There’s a bunch of other sites that seems to serve the same pop-up purpose:
- fugdownload101.com
- fugdownload102.com
- fugdownload103.com
- fugdownload104.com
- fugdownload105.com
- fugdownload106.com
- fugdownload107.com
- fugdownload108.com
- fugdownload109.com
- fugdownload110.com
- fugdownload111.com
- fugdownload112.com
- fugdownload113.com
- fugdownload114.com
- fugdownload115.com
- fugdownload116.com
- fugdownload117.com
- fugdownload118.com
- fugdownload119.com
- fugdownload120.com
- fugdownload121.com
- fugdownload122.com
- fugdownload123.com
- fugdownload124.com
- fugdownload125.com
- fugdownload126.com
- fugdownload127.com
- fugdownload128.com
- fugdownload129.com
- fugdownload130.com
I will not be surprised if the follow domains pop up too:
- fugdownload131.com
- fugdownload132.com
- fugdownload133.com
- fugdownload134.com
- fugdownload135.com
- fugdownload136.com
- fugdownload137.com
- fugdownload138.com
- fugdownload139.com
- fugdownload140.com
Update 2015-12-14: Found these domains.
- fugdownload143.com
- fugdownload144.com
- fugdownload145.com
Guess we will see fugdownload146.com, fugdownload147.com, fugdownload148.com and fugdownload149.com soon too.
So, how do you remove the fugdownload128.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the fugdownload128.com ads I had gosearch.me, Windows Menager, Live Malware Protection and SmartComp Safe Network installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the fugdownload128.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.
It seems as fugdownload***.com sites are getting quite a lot of traffic, based on Alexa’s 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 running 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 fugdownload128.com ads removal:
The first thing I would do to remove the fugdownload128.com pop-ups is to examine the software 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 OS 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 some program was installed about the same time as you started getting the fugdownload128.com pop-ups.
Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often show up under the add-ons menu in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there something that looks suspicious? Anything that you don’t remember installing?
I think most users will be able to find 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 started develop many years ago. Freefixer is a tool built to manually track down and uninstall 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 crippled like many other removal tools out there. It will not require you to pay for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.
And if you’re having a hard time determining 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 additional information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:
Here’s a video tutorial which shows FreeFixer in action removing adware that caused pop-up ads:
Did this blog post help you to remove the fugdownload128.com pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.
Thank you!