Did you just get a pop-up survey from greatworldonline.xyz and ponder where it came from? Did the greatworldonline.xyz 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 greatworldonline.xyz pop-up show up while you clicked a link on one of the major search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo?

Here’s a screen dump of the greatworldonline.xyz pop-up survey ad when it showed up on my computer:

(Sorry for the ridiculous use of watermarks. I have to do it to stop the copy-cats.)

If this description sounds like your machine, you most likely have some adware installed on your system that pop up the greatworldonline.xyz ads. There’s no use contacting the owners of the site you were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you to remove the greatworldonline.xyz surveys in this blog post.

If you have been visiting this blog already know this, but if you are new: Not long ago I dedicated a few of my lab computers and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. I have been following the behaviour on these systems 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 downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the machines. I first observed the greatworldonline.xyz pop-up survey on one of these lab computers.

greatworldonline.xyz was created on 2014-11-19. greatworldonline.xyz resolves to 184.73.247.179 and d96zz.exclusiverewards.greatworldonline.xyz to the 66.228.56.155 IP address.

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

The issue with this type of survey pop-ups 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 greatworldonline.xyz pop-up ads you need to review your system 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 greatworldonline.xyz 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 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 shady listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed about the same time as you started seeing the greatworldonline.xyz pop-ups.

I think most users will be able to find and uninstall 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’ve developed since 2006. Freefixer is a tool built to manually track down and remove unwanted software. When you’ve found 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 won’t require you to pay for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having a mess deciding if a file is clean or adware in the FreeFixer scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains more information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

Did this blog post help you to remove the greatworldonline.xyz pop-up surveys? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!

Update 2014-11-30: The following subdomain spotted: somzz.exclusiverewards.greatworldonline.xyz. Resolves to 50.116.45.106.