Remove a.networksadvertiser.com Pop Up Ads

Did you just get a pop-up from a.networksadvertiser.com and wonder where it came from? Did the a.networksadvertiser.com ad appear to have been launched from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use aggressive advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the a.networksadvertiser.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 a screen dump on the a.networksadvertiser.com pop-up tab from my computer:

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your machine, you probably have some adware installed on your system that pops up the a.networksadvertiser.com ads. Contacting the owner of the website would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the ads. I’ll do my best to help you remove the a.networksadvertiser.com pop-up in this blog post.

Those that have been visiting this blog already know this, but here we go: Recently I dedicated some of my lab systems and intentionally installed some adware programs on them. Since then I have been observing the actions 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 installs additional unwanted software on the systems. I first spotted the a.networksadvertiser.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

a.networksadvertiser.com was created on 2013-09-24. a.networksadvertiser.com resolves to 50.112.103.124. Thanks to Alexa, here’s the traffic rank:

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

The problem with pop-ups like 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.

To remove the a.networksadvertiser.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:

The first thing I would do to remove the a.networksadvertiser.com pop-ups is to examine the software 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 dubious in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed approximately about the same time as you started observing the a.networksadvertiser.com pop-ups.

Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often show up under the add-ons menu in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users will be able to find 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 started develop many years ago. Freefixer is a tool built to manually identify and uninstall unwanted software. When you’ve tracked down 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 will not require you to pay a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having a hard time figuring out if a file is legit or unsafe in the FreeFixer scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your browser with a page which contains more information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful: