Tag Archives: 173.255.219.8

Remove slavesail.xyz Pop-Up Survey Ads

Having a hard time with pop-up surveys from slavesail.xyz? If so, you might have adware installed on your machine. I got the slavesail.xyz pop ups in Firefox, but they can appear if you are using Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera too.

Here is how the slavesail.xyz ad looked like on my machine:slavesail.xyz

Does this sound like what you see your computer, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the slavesail.xyz ads. There’s no use contacting the owners of the web site you were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you with the slavesail.xyz removal in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: Not long ago I dedicated some of my lab systems and intentionally installed some adware programs on them. I have been monitoring 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 and installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first spotted the slavesail.xyz pop-up on one of these lab machines.

slavesail.xyz was registered on 2014-12-03. hhezz.super-promo.slavesail.xyz resolves to the 173.255.219.8 address and slavesail.xyz to 184.73.247.179.

So, how do you remove the slavesail.xyz pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the slavesail.xyz ads I had TinyWallet, BrowserWarden and BlockAndSurf installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the slavesail.xyz 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 know this since the pop-up ad had a label with the adware name: “Ads by BlockAndSurf“.

Ads by BlockAndSurf pop-up

What label did your pop-up ad have? Please share by posting a comment below.

The issue with pop-ups like this one is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware, not just the adware on my system. 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 slavesail.xyz pop-up ads you need to review your machine 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 slavesail.xyz pop-ups is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can open 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:
Uninstall a program search

Click on the “Uninstall a program” link and the Uninstall programs dialog will open up:
Uninstall a program dialog

Do you see something strange-looking listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed approximately about the same time as you started observing the slavesail.xyz pop-ups.

Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often show up under the add-ons menu in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there something that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?
Firefox add-ons manager

I think you will be able to identify 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 started develop about 8 years ago. It’s a tool designed to manually find 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 crippled like many other removal tools out there. It won’t require you to pay a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having difficulties deciding if a file is clean or adware in FreeFixer’s scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your web browser with a page which contains additional information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

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 this blog post help you to remove the slavesail.xyz pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!