Did you just get a pop-up survey from toesbait.xyz and wonder where it came from? Did the toesbait.xyz ad appear to have been popped up from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use aggressive advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the toesbait.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 capture of the toesbait.xyz pop-up survey when it showed up on my computer in a new tab:

If this description sounds like your computer, you most likely have some adware installed on your system that pop up the toesbait.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 with the toesbait.xyz survey removal in this blog post.

Those that have been reading this blog already know this, but for new visitors: A little while back I dedicated a few of my lab systems and knowingly installed a few adware programs on them. I’ve been tracking 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 additional unwanted software on the computers. I first found the toesbait.xyz pop-up on one of these lab computers.

mpgzz.super-promo.toesbait.xyz resolves to the 104.207.138.165 address and toesbait.xyz to 184.73.247.179.

So, how do you remove the toesbait.xyz pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the toesbait.xyz ads I had TinyWallet, Browser Warden and BlockAndSurf installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the toesbait.xyz pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in .

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 toesbait.xyz ads removal:

1. Review what programs you have installed in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel. Do you see anything that you don’t remember installing or that was recently installed?
2. You can also examine the browser add-ons. 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:

   

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

Thank you!