Did you just get a pop-up from safesoftware18.com and ask yourself where it came from? Did the safesoftware18.com ad appear to have been launched from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the safesoftware18.com pop-up show up while you clicked a link on one of the major search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo?

Here is a screenshot on the safesoftware18.com pop-up from my system:

If this description sounds like what you are seeing, you probably have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the safesoftware18.com ads. So don’t send angry emails to the web site you were browsing, the ads are probably not coming from them, but from the adware on your computer. I’ll do my best to help you remove the safesoftware18.com pop up in this blog post.

Those that have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Some time ago I dedicated a few of my lab machines and intentionally installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I have been monitoring the behaviour 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 machines. I first observed the safesoftware18.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

www.safesoftware18.com resolves 54.192.98.139.

I’ve also spotted a bunch of similar domains:

• safesoftware10.com
• safesoftware11.com
• safesoftware12.com
• safesoftware13.com
• safesoftware14.com
• safesoftware15.com
• safesoftware16.com
• safesoftware17.com

I will not be surprised if the follow domains shows up in the future:

• safesoftware18.com
• safesoftware19.com
• safesoftware20.com
• safesoftware21.com
• safesoftware22.com
• safesoftware23.com
• safesoftware24.com
• safesoftware25.com
• safesoftware26.com
• safesoftware27.com
• safesoftware28.com
• safesoftware29.com
• safesoftware30.com

So, how do you remove the safesoftware18.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the safesoftware18.com ads I had Windows Menager, Live Malware Protection, SmartComp Safe Network and gosearch.me installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the safesoftware18.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

The problem with pop-ups like this one is that it can be launched 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 safesoftware18.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the safesoftware18.com pop-ups is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can reach 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 suspect in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed approximately about the same time as you started getting the safesoftware18.com pop-ups.

Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons menu in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think you will be able to find 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 track down and remove unwanted software. When you’ve found 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 will not require you to pay a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having difficulties determining if a file is legit or adware in FreeFixer’s scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains more information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

Here’s a video tutorial which shows FreeFixer in action removing adware that caused pop-up ads:

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the safesoftware18.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!