Did you just get a pop up from socialnewtab.com and wonder where it came from? Did the socialnewtab.com ad appear to have been initiated from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the socialnewtab.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 how the socialnewtab.com ad looked like on my computer:

Does this sound like what you see your computer, you presumably have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the socialnewtab.com ads. Contacting the owner of the web site would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the ads. I’ll try help you with the socialnewtab.com removal in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: Recently I dedicated some of my lab machines and knowingly installed a few adware programs on them. I have been following the actions on these computers to see what kinds of adverts that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware updates itself automatically, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the machines. I first observed the socialnewtab.com pop-up on one of these lab systems.

socialnewtab.com was created on 2015-08-19. The registrant is Imali Media n.i ltd. according to DomainTools. socialnewtab.com resolves to the 108.59.81.209 address.

According to YouGetSignal’s reverse service are the following domains located on the same IP:

• downanapp.com
• downthat.com
• emaildefend.com
• imalimedia.net
• improveyourpc.today
• iqabrowser.com
• newtabtv.com
• realcoolmovie.com
• safebrowsesearch.com
• search.internetquickaccess.com
• search.realcoolmovie.com
• socialnewtab.com
• videoplayerclassic.com
• www.improveyourpc.today
• www.internetquickaccess.com
• www.newtab-tv.com
• www.newtabtvsearch.com
• www.xcb.biz

So, how do you remove the socialnewtab.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the socialnewtab.com ads I had CPUMiner, GamesDesktop and PineTree installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the socialnewtab.com 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, not just the adware that’s installed on my computer. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

So, what can be done? To remove the socialnewtab.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:

The first thing I would do to remove the socialnewtab.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 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 strange-looking in 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 getting the socialnewtab.com pop-ups.

The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons menu in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Is there something that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users will be able to track down 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’ve developed since 2006. It’s a tool built to manually track down 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 locked like many other removal tools out there. It will not require you to pay for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having troubles determining if a file is safe or malware in the FreeFixer scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains more details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:

Here you can see FreeFixer in action removing pop-up ads:

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

Thank you!