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

Here’s how the a.mrktads.net pop-up looked like when I got it on my computer:

Does this sound like what you are seeing, you most likely have some adware installed on your system that pops up the a.mrktads.net ads. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the website you currently were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you with the a.mrktads.net removal in this blog post.

If you have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but if you are new: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab machines and intentionally installed some adware programs on them. Since then I have been observing the behaviour on these computers to see what kinds of ads that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware auto-updates, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the computers. I first spotted the a.mrktads.net pop-up on one of these lab machines.

a.mrktads.net resolves to the 50.112.103.124 IP address. a.mrktads.net was created on 2013-10-10. According to YouGetSignal.com’s reverse Whois service the following domains also resolve to the same IP:

• a.advertisermarkets.com
• a.advertisernets.com
• a.marketsadvertiser.com
• a.mrktads.net
• core.adtech.de

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

Judging from Alexa’s traffic rank, a.mrktads.net is getting quite a lot of traffic:

The traffic has been steadily increasing since June 2014 and the site is now ranked 5159 in the world.

The problem with pop-ups such as this one 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.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the a.mrktads.net ads removal:

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?
2. How about your browser add-ons. Anything in the list that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that didn’t help, you can give FreeFixer a try. FreeFixer is built to assist users when manually tracking down adware and other types of unwanted software. It is a freeware utility that I’ve been working since 2006 and it scans your machine at lots of locations where unwanted software is known to hook into your machine. If you would like to get additional details about a file in FreeFixer’s scan result, you can just click the More Info link for that file and a web page with a VirusTotal report will open up, which can be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

   

Here’s a video guide showing how to remove pop-up ads with FreeFixer:

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the a.mrktads.net ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!