Did you just get a pop-up from static.offpageads.com and wonder where it came from? Did the static.offpageads.com ad appear to have been initiated from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the static.offpageads.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 how the static.offpageads.com ad looked like on my machine:

The pop up ad was for AliExpress.

Does this sound like what you are seeing, you apparently have some adware installed on your system that pops up the static.offpageads.com ads. So there’s no use contacting the site owner. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you remove the static.offpageads.com pop-up in this blog post.

If you have been visiting this blog already know this, but if you are new: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab machines and deliberately installed some adware programs on them. I’ve been tracking 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 auto-updates, or if it downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the systems. I first noticed the static.offpageads.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

static.offpageads.com resolves to the 185.93.0.27 IP address and offpageads.com to 184.168.221.61. static.offpageads.com was created on 2012-09-18.

So, how do you remove the static.offpageads.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the static.offpageads.com ads I had GamesDesktop, PineTree and CPUMiner installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the static.offpageads.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

If you are wonder if there are many others out there also getting the static.offpageads.com ads, the answer is probably yes. Check out the traffic rank from Alexa:

The bad news with pop-ups like the one described in this blog post is that it can be launched by many variants of adware, not just the adware that’s installed on my machine. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the static.offpageads.com ads removal:

1. Review 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?
2. You can also examine the browser add-ons. Same thing here, do you see something 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’s a video tutorial on how to remove the pop-ups with FreeFixer:

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

Thank you!