Does this sound like your story? You see popup ads from media-surv.com while browsing sites that usually don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to find a way round the built-in popup blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Maybe the media-surv.com pop-ups appear when clicking search results from a Google search? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s how the media-surv.com pop-up looked like when I got it on my system:

If this description sounds like your machine, you apparently have some adware installed on your system that pops up the media-surv.com ads. There’s no use contacting the owners of the web site you currently were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the media-surv.com 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 computers and intentionally installed a few adware programs on them. I’ve been monitoring the behaviour on these machines 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 systems. I first noticed the media-surv.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

media-surv.com resolves to the 162.255.119.251 address and www.media-surv.com to 54.192.195.34. media-surv.com was registered on 2015-12-09.

Here’s the traffic rank for media-surv.com:

So, how do you remove the media-surv.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the media-surv.com ads I had PineTree, GamesDesktop and CPUMiner installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the media-surv.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 popped up 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.

To remove the media-surv.com pop-up ads you need to review your system 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 media-surv.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 listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed approximately about the same time as you started getting the media-surv.com pop-ups.

Then you can examine you browser add-ons. Adware often turn up under the add-ons dialog in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users 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 built to manually track down and remove 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 down 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 a mess figuring out 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 browser with a page which contains more details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

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

Thank you!