Sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from rsb.coolideaso.com while browsing web sites that generally don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to escape the built-in pop-up blockers in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the rsb.coolideaso.com pop-ups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups turn up even when you’re not browsing?

Here is how the rsb.coolideaso.com ad looked like on my machine:

Sometimes the actual ad was shown at this web site and sometimes the pop-up redirected to adcash.com.

Does this sound like what you see your system, you probably have some adware installed on your system that pops up the rsb.coolideaso.com ads. Don’t send angry emails to the site you were browsing, the ads are presumably not coming from them, but from the adware on your system. I’ll try help you with the rsb.coolideaso.com removal in this blog post.

Those that have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but here we go: Recently I dedicated some of my lab machines and intentionally installed some adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been observing the actions 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 installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first observed the rsb.coolideaso.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

rsb.coolideaso.com resolves to the 208.43.241.246 address. rsb.coolideaso.com was registered on 2014-11-23. According to YouGetSignal reverse whois service, the following domains also resolves to that IP:

• control.staticlyrics.com
• dss.drivefor.net
• fms.diveunsuredeputy.com
• gir.driveropti.net
• gym.macpath.net
• hwt.foreignsign.com
• jco.mappre.net
• jdn.opendone.net
• jzn.toolopen.net
• rou.resyncload.net
• unp.staticlib.net

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

BlockAndSurf was the adware that caused the pop-ups in my case. I could see this since it was kind enough to label the pop-up ad with the adware name: “Ads by BlockAndSurf“.

What label did your pop-up ad have? Please share in the comments below.

The problem with this type of popup is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware, not just the adware on my system. I think that adware such as NewPlayer, Salus, CheckMeUp and SaferSurf can also be responsible for the rsb.coolideaso.com popups. And there are probably other variants too. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

To remove the rsb.coolideaso.com pop-up ads you need to examine your computer for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

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 solve the problem, 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 you can see FreeFixer in action removing the adware that caused the rsb.coolideaso.com pop-up ads:

Are you a Mac or Linux user and get the rsb.coolideaso.com pop-ups? What did you do to stop the pop-up in your browser? Please share in the comments below. Thank you very much!

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

Thank you!