Remove fastworldconnect.xyz Pop-Up Survey Ads

Does this sound like your story? You see pop-up surveys from fastworldconnect.xyz while browsing web sites that mostly don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to sidestep the built-in pop-up blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari.

Here’s how the fastworldconnect.xyz pop-up looked like when I got it on my computer:

fastworldconnect.xyz

If this description sounds like your computer, you apparently have some adware installed on your machine that pop up the fastworldconnect.xyz surveys. I’ll do my best to help you remove the fastworldconnect.xyz in this blog post.

If you have been reading this blog already know this, but if you are new: Recently I dedicated some of my lab computers and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been observing the behaviour 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 auto-updates, or if it installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first observed the fastworldconnect.xyz pop-up surveys on one of these lab systems.

k9kzz.rewardzone.fastworldconnect.xyz resolves to 104.207.156.103, and fastworldconnect.xyz to 184.73.247.179. The domain was registered just a few days ago.

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

The issue with this type of pop-up survey 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.

To remove the fastworldconnect.xyz pop-up surveys you need to review your system for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

  1. Check what programs you have installed in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel. Do you see something that you don’t remember installing and that was recently installed?
  2. You can also review the add-ons that you have in your browser. Same thing here, do you see something that you don’t remember installing?
  3. If that does not 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:

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

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

Thank you!