Does this sound like your story? You see pop-up ads from url.fbtracking.com while browsing at web sites that generally don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to sidestep the built-in pop-up blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Maybe the url.fbtracking.com pop-ups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s how the url.fbtracking.com pop-up looked like when I got it on my computer:

(I know, lots of watermarks. Have to do it to stop the copy-cats.)

If you also see this on your machine, you most likely have some adware installed on your system that pops up the url.fbtracking.com ads. Contacting the site owner would be a waste of time. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you remove the url.fbtracking.com pop-up in this blog post.

Those that have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab computers and knowingly installed some adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been following the behaviour on these machines to see what kinds of advertisements that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware auto-updates, or if it installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first found the url.fbtracking.com pop-up on one of these lab systems.

url.fbtracking.com resolves to 52.3.91.240 and fbtracking.com to the 66.96.163.136 IP address. url.fbtracking.com was created on 2011-07-24.

So, how do you remove the url.fbtracking.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the url.fbtracking.com ads I had SFKEX64.exe, PhaseProfessor, WebShield, Wajam, PrimaryColor, mystartsearch, YTDownloader, SSFK.exe and FastSearch installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the url.fbtracking.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

The issue with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be initiated by many variants of adware, not just the adware that’s installed on my system. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the url.fbtracking.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the url.fbtracking.com pop-ups is to examine the programs 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 Operating System 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 strange-looking listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed approximately about the same time as you started observing the url.fbtracking.com pop-ups.

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

I think you will be able to identify 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. It’s a tool designed to manually track down and remove 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 a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having problems deciding if a file is clean or unsafe in FreeFixer’s scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains additional details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite 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 url.fbtracking.com pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!