Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from targetingadvertiser.com while browsing web sites that typically don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to evade the built-in pop-up blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Maybe the targetingadvertiser.com pop-ups appear when clicking search results from the Google search engine? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

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

The subdomains is a.targetingadvertiser.com.

If you also see this on your system, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the targetingadvertiser.com ads. So there’s no use contacting the site owner. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you with the targetingadvertiser.com removal in this blog post.

Those that have been reading this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab systems and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. I have been following the behaviour on these computers 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 downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first noticed the targetingadvertiser.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

a.targetingadvertiser.com resolves to 54.244.235.229. Here’s the traffic rank, thanks to Alexa:

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

The bad news with pop-ups such as this one 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.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the targetingadvertiser.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. You can also check the browser add-ons. Same thing here, do you see anything that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that did 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:

   

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

Thank you!