Having difficulties with pop-up surveys from awardclass.biz? If so, you might have adware installed on your system. I got the awardclass.biz pop-ups in Firefox, but they can appear if you are using Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera too.

Here is how the awardclass.biz ad looked like on my system:

If this description sounds like your experience, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your system that pop up the awardclass.biz surveys. So don’t send angry emails to the site you were browsing, the ads are most likely not coming from them, but from the adware on your machine. I’ll try help you with the awardclass.biz removal in this blog post.

If you have been visiting this blog already know this, but if you are new: Some time ago I dedicated a few of my lab computers and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. I’ve been tracking the actions on these machines to see what kinds of ads that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware updates itself automatically, or if it downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first noticed the awardclass.biz pop-up survey on one of these lab systems.

awardclass.biz was registered on 2014-10-29. awardclass.biz resolves to the 184.73.247.179 IP address and bafzz.promorewards.awardclass.biz to 23.92.30.89.

So, how do you remove the awardclass.biz pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the awardclass.biz ads I had Browser Warden, TinyWallet and BlockAndSurf installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the awardclass.biz 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 awardclass.biz survey ads, the answer is probably yes. Check out the traffic rank from Alexa:

The issue with this type of pop-up 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 surveys.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the awardclass.biz survey removal:

1. Examine what programs you have installed in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel. Do you see anything that you don’t remember installing or that was recently installed?
2. You can also examine the add-ons you have in your browsers. 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:

   

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the awardclass.biz surveys? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!