Does this sound like your story? You see pop-up survey ads from mittenriddle.country while browsing websites that typically don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to find a way round the built-in pop-up blockers in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the mittenriddle.country pop-ups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here is a screenshot on the mittenriddle.country pop-up survey from my system:

If you also see this on your computer, you probably have some adware installed on your system that pops up the mittenriddle.country ads. Contacting the owner of the web site would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the ads. I’ll do my best to help you remove the mittenriddle.country pop-up in this blog post.

Those that have been following this blog already know this, but here we go: A little while back I dedicated some of my lab machines and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been monitoring 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 auto-updates, or if it downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the machines. I first noticed the mittenriddle.country pop-up on one of these lab systems.

mittenriddle.country was created on 2015-01-07. mittenriddle.country resolves to 184.73.247.179 and csczz.super-promo.mittenriddle.country to the 104.207.141.159 IP address.

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

The bad news 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.

So, what should done to solve the problem? To remove the mittenriddle.country pop-up ads you need to examine your system for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

1. Review 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 you installed in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Same thing here, do you see anything that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that didn’t solve the problem, 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 you can see FreeFixer in action removing pop-up ads:

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

Thank you!