Sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from ad124m.adk2.net while browsing on sites that typically don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to escape the built-in pop-up blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Perhaps the ad124m.adk2.net pop-ups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups show up even when you’re not browsing?

Here is how the ad124m.adk2.net ad looked like on my system:

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your machine, you apparently have some adware installed on your system that pops up the ad124m.adk2.net ads. Contacting the owner of the website would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the advertisements. I’ll do my best to help you with the ad124m.adk2.net removal in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: Not long ago I dedicated some of my lab machines and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. I have been following 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 downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the systems. I first found the ad124m.adk2.net pop-up on one of these lab systems.

ad124m.adk2.net was created on 2013-09-30. ad124m.adk2.net resolves to 130.211.172.187. Here’s the traffic rank for adk2.net:

So, how do you remove the ad124m.adk2.net pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the ad124m.adk2.net ads I had TinyWallet, BrowserWarden and BlockAndSurf installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the ad124m.adk2.net pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

The issue with pop-ups like the one described in this blog post is that it can be popped up 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 ad124m.adk2.net 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 you installed in your browsers. Anything in the list that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that didn’t help, 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 you can see FreeFixer in action removing the adware that caused pop-up ads:

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the ad124m.adk2.net ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!