Did you just get a pop-up or a new tab from cts.adssend.net and wonder where it came from? Did the cts.adssend.net 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 new tabs? Or did the cts.adssend.net pop-up show up while you clicked a link on one of the major search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo?

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

After a while it redirect to some the actual advertisement.

If this description sounds like your experience, you probably have some adware installed on your computer that pop up the cts.adssend.net ads. So don’t flame the people that owns the web site you were at, the ads are presumably not coming from that site, but from the adware that’s installed on your system. I’ll do my best to help you remove the cts.adssend.net 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 systems and intentionally installed a few adware programs on them. I have been observing 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, or if it installs additional unwanted software on the systems. I first found the cts.adssend.net pop-up on one of these lab computers.

cts.adssend.net resolves to 54.245.92.32. adssend.net was registered on 2013-12-18 and it’s getting quite a lot of traffic and seems to be steadily increasing.

Thanks to Alexa for the traffic rank.

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

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.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the cts.adssend.net ads removal:

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 check the add-ons that you have in your browser. 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 which shows FreeFixer in action removing pop-ups caused by adware:

Did this blog post help you to remove the cts.adssend.net pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!