Tag Archives: bannersdontwork.com

Remove display-buy.com Pop-Up Ads

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

Here’s how the display-buy.com pop-up looked like when I got it on my machine:display-buy.com pop-up(Sorry for the watermarks. Need to add them to prevent the most blatant attempts of other bloggers using my screenshots without attribution)

Does this sounds like what you are seeing, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your system that pop up the display-buy.com ads. So don’t send angry emails to the site you were browsing, the advertisements are presumably not coming from them, but from the adware on your computer. I’ll try help you to remove the display-buy.com in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: Some time ago I dedicated a few of my lab computers and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been following the actions on these computers 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 systems. I first noticed the display-buy.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

display-buy.com was registered on 2013-08-06. display-buy.com resolves to the 54.204.151.128 address. It appears to be a dedicated server.

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

It seems as display-buy.com is getting quite a lot of traffic, based on Alexa’s traffic rank:

display-buy.com traffic rankThe site had a traffic spike in February/March then again a big spike in October. The 25K traffic rank shows that it get quite a lot of traffic.

Alexa also have some info which the “Upstream Sites” are: bannersdontwork.com, akamaihd.net, mcafeestore.com, hrtnvk.com and srshql.com.

The issue with this type of pop-up is that it I think 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.

To remove the display-buy.com pop-up ads you need to examine your machine 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 something that you don’t remember installing or that was recently installed? Do you see any of the three adware programs I mentioned above?
  2. You can also check the browser add-ons. Same thing here, do you see anything 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:

    FreeFixer More Info link example
    An example of FreeFixer’s “More Info” links. Click for full size.

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

Thank you!