Tag Archives: 146.148.88.12

Remove s.rev2pub.com Pop Up Ads

Does this sound like what you are seeing right now? You see pop-up ads from s.rev2pub.com while browsing sites that normally don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to sidestep the built-in pop-up blockers in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Maybe the s.rev2pub.com pop-ups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s a screen capture of the s.rev2pub.com pop-up ad when it showed up on my machine in a new tab:

s.rev2pub.com

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

If you also see this on your system, you presumably have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the s.rev2pub.com ads. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the site you currently were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you remove the s.rev2pub.com pop-up in this blog post.

I found the s.rev2pub.com pop-up on one of the lab computers where I have some adware running. I’ve talked about this in some of the previous blog posts. The adware was installed on purpose, and from time to time I check if anything new has appeared, such as pop-up windows, new tabs in the browsers, injected ads on web site that usually don’t show ads, or if some new files have been saved to the hard-drive.

s.rev2pub.com resolves to the 146.148.88.12 address and rev2pub.com to 184.72.246.247. s.rev2pub.com was registered on 2013-11-27.

So, how do you remove the s.rev2pub.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the s.rev2pub.com ads I had istartsurf, MedPlayerNewVersion and Movie Wizard installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the s.rev2pub.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

The s.rev2pub.com domain is attracting quite a lot of traffic, just check out the Alexa traffic rank:

rev2pub.com traffic rank

The issue with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware, not just the adware running on my machine. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

So, what can be done to solve the problem? To remove the s.rev2pub.com pop-up ads you need to review your computer 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 anything 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, 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:

    FreeFixer More Info link example
    An example of FreeFixer’s “More Info” links. Click for full size.

Here you can see FreeFixer in action removing the adware that caused pop-up ads:

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the s.rev2pub.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!