Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from onadstracker.com while browsing websites that in general don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to bypass the built-in pop-up blockers in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the onadstracker.com 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 onadstracker.com pop-up looked like when I got it on my machine:

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your machine, you apparently have some adware installed on your system that pops up the onadstracker.com ads. Contacting the owner of the site would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the advertisements. I’ll do my best to help you remove the onadstracker.com 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 some of my lab machines and knowingly installed some adware programs on them. 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 updates itself, or if it installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first found the onadstracker.com pop-up on one of these lab systems.

onadstracker.com was registered on 2014-10-26 and resolves to 54.219.142.13. According to domaintools.com affclicker.com, clicksinventory.com and cloudtracked.com are also located on the same IP address. YouGetSignal’s reverse web site lookup service reports that js.equestions.com is also located on the 54.219.142.13 IP.

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

It seems as onadstracker.com is 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 launched 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.

So, what should done to solve the problem? To remove the onadstracker.com pop-up ads you need to examine your system for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

1. Examine 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 browser add-ons. 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’s a video tutorial showing FreeFixer in action removing pop-up ads:

Did this blog post help you to remove the onadstracker.com pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!