Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up ads or new tabs from a.advertisernets.com while browsing at web sites that generally don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to bypass the built-in pop-up blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Maybe the a.advertisernets.com pop-ups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups show up even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s a screenshot of the a.advertisernets.com pop-up ad when it showed up on my computer:

Does this sounds like your experience, you most likely have some adware installed on your computer that pop up the a.advertisernets.com ads. Don’t write angry emails to the website you were browsing, the ads are most likely not coming from them, but from the adware on your computer. I’ll do my best to help you remove the a.advertisernets.com in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: A little while back I dedicated a few of my lab computers and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. Since then 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 updates itself, or if it installs additional unwanted software on the machines. I first noticed the a.advertisernets.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

a.advertisernets.com was registered on 2013-09-24. a.advertisernets.com resolves to the 54.214.13.64 IP address. According to the reverse whois by yougetsignal.com the following domain also resolves to the same IP: a.advertisermarkets.com, a.marketsadvertiser.com and core.adtech.de.

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

Judging from Alexa’s traffic rank, a.advertisernets.com have been getting quite a lot of traffic during the last 12 months:

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 pop-ups.

To remove the a.advertisernets.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. Check 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 review the add-ons that you have in your browser. Same thing here, do you see anything that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that did not 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 this blog post help you to remove the a.advertisernets.com pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!