Does this sound like what you are seeing right now? You see pop-up ads from rackcdn.com while browsing websites that generally don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop ups manage to get round the built-in pop-up blockers in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Maybe the rackcdn.com pop-ups appear when clicking search results from a Google search? Or does the pop-ups show up even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s how the rackcdn.com pop-up looked like when I got it on my machine:

(Sorry for the large number of watermarks. If I don’t add them, the screenshot will be used without attribution at some other blogs)

If you also see this on your system, you most likely have some adware installed on your system that pops up the rackcdn.com ads. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the website you currently were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the rackcdn.com removal in this blog post.

If you have been visiting this blog already know this, but if you are new: Recently I dedicated some of my lab computers and wilfully installed some adware programs on them. I’ve been tracking the actions on these systems 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 machines. I first spotted the rackcdn.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

So, how do you remove the rackcdn.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the rackcdn.com ads I had CPUMiner, PineTree and GamesDesktop installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the rackcdn.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 launched by many variants of adware, not just the adware that’s installed 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 rackcdn.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. How about your add-ons that you have in your browser. Anything in the list that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that does 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 system 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 you can see FreeFixer in action removing pop-up ads:

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

Thank you!