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

Here’s how the dating.magentostaging.com pop-up looked like when I got it on my system:

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your machine, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your system that pops up the dating.magentostaging.com ads. Don’t blame the people that runs the web site you were at, the ads are presumably not coming from that website, but from the adware that’s running on your computer. I’ll try help you to remove the dating.magentostaging.com pop-ups in this blog post.

Those that have been visiting this blog already know this, but for new visitors: A little while back I dedicated a few of my lab machines and deliberately installed some adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been observing 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 updates itself automatically, or if it downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the machines. I first found the dating.magentostaging.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

dating.magentostaging.com was created on 2014-07-02. dating.magentostaging.com resolves to the 74.119.234.60 IP address.

So, how do you remove the dating.magentostaging.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the dating.magentostaging.com ads I had Live Malware Protection, gosearch.me, Windows Menager and SmartComp Safe Network installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the dating.magentostaging.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

The problem with this type of pop-up is that it can be initiated 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 dating.magentostaging.com ads removal:

1. What software do you have installed if you look in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel? Something that you don’t remember installing yourself or that was recently installed?
2. You can also examine the browser add-ons. Same thing here, do you see something that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that did not help, you can give FreeFixer a try. FreeFixer is built to assist users when manually tracking down adware and other types of unwanted software. It is a freeware utility that I’ve been working since 2006 and it scans your machine at lots of locations where unwanted software is known to hook into your machine. If you would like to get additional details about a file in FreeFixer’s scan result, you can just click the More Info link for that file and a web page with a VirusTotal report will open up, which can be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

   

Here’s a video guide showing how to remove pop-up ads with FreeFixer:

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the dating.magentostaging.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!