Does this sound like your story? You see pop-up ads from efoxnews.net while browsing sites that mostly don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to evade the built-in pop-up blockers in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the efoxnews.net pop-ups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

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

If you also see this on your machine, you probably have some adware installed on your system that pops up the efoxnews.net ads. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the site you were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you to remove the efoxnews.net pop ups in this blog post.

Those that have been reading this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Not long ago I dedicated a few of my lab systems and intentionally installed some adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been observing the behaviour 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 downloads additional unwanted software on the systems. I first observed the efoxnews.net pop-up on one of these lab computers.

efoxnews.net was registered on 2015-04-22. Here’s the Alexa traffic rank:

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

The bad news with this type of pop-up is that it can be initiated 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 efoxnews.net 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:

The first thing I would do to remove the efoxnews.net pop-ups is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can find this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows OS 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 suspicious in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed about the same time as you started getting the efoxnews.net pop-ups.

Then you can examine you browser add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons menu in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Anything that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users will be able to identify and remove 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’ve developed since 2006. It’s a tool designed to manually find and uninstall 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 won’t require you to pay for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having a hard time determining if a file is clean or malware in FreeFixer’s scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains additional 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 efoxnews.net ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!