Does this sound like your story? You see pop-up ads from facebook.news-cm.info while browsing sites that in general don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The popups manage to evade the built-in pop-up blockers in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the facebook.news-cm.info pop-ups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups show up even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s how the facebook.news-cm.info pop-up looked like when I got it on my machine:

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

If you also see this on your machine, you apparently have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the facebook.news-cm.info 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 facebook.news-cm.info pop-up 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 computers and intentionally installed some adware programs on them. I’ve been observing the actions 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 installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first found the facebook.news-cm.info pop-up on one of these lab computers.

facebook.news-cm.info was created on 2015-05-28. facebook.news-cm.info resolves to 72.246.64.131.

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

It seems as news-cm.info is getting quite a lot of traffic, based on Alexa’s traffic rank:

The traffic to news-cm.info has been climbing steadily since middle of June 2015.

The problem with this type of pop-up is that it can be launched 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 facebook.news-cm.info ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the facebook.news-cm.info pop-ups is to examine the programs 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 suspicious listed 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 facebook.news-cm.info pop-ups.

The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Adware often show up under the add-ons menu in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there something that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users 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 started develop about 8 years ago. It’s a tool built to manually find and remove 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 won’t require you to purchase the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having a hard time deciding if a file is legit or adware in the FreeFixer scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your web 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 you can see FreeFixer in action removing pop-up ads:

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

Thank you!