Did you just get interrupted by a pop-up ad from s.ws2wn.com?. You are not alone. I also get the s.ws2wn.com pop-ups while browsing. Do the pop-ups also sidestep the pop-up blocker in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Then read on…

Here is a screenshot on the s.ws2wn.com pop-up from my system when it appeared in a new tab:

Does this sound like what you see your computer, you probably have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the s.ws2wn.com ads. So there’s no use contacting the site owner. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you remove the s.ws2wn.com pop-up in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: Not long ago I dedicated some of my lab machines and purposely installed some 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 updates itself automatically, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the machines. I first noticed the s.ws2wn.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

s.ws2wn.com resolves to 54.235.197.162. s.ws2wn.com was created on 2014-11-10.

So, how do you remove the s.ws2wn.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the s.ws2wn.com ads I had TinyWallet, BrowserWarden and BlockAndSurf installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the s.ws2wn.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

The issue with pop-ups like this one 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 s.ws2wn.com ads removal:

1. What software do you have installed if you look in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel? Something that you don’t remember installing yourself 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 does not help, you can give FreeFixer a try. FreeFixer is built to assist users when manually tracking down adware and other types of unwanted software. It is a freeware utility that I’ve been working since 2006 and it scans your system at lots of locations where unwanted software is known to hook into your computer. If you would like to get additional details about a file in FreeFixer’s scan result, you can just click the More Info link for that file and a web page with a VirusTotal report will open up, which can be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

   

Here’s a video tutorial showing FreeFixer in action removing pop-up ads:

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the s.ws2wn.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!