Does this sound like what you are seeing right now? You see pop-up ads from bannerflow.com while browsing websites that in general don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to bypass the built-in pop-up blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Perhaps the bannerflow.com popups turn up when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here is a screenshot on the bannerflow.com pop-up from my computer:

The ad shown in the pop up was for casinosaga.com. The subdomain was casinosaga.host.bannerflow.com.

Does this sound like what you see your computer, you presumably have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the bannerflow.com ads. Contacting the owner of the site would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the ads. I’ll do my best to help you with the bannerflow.com removal in this blog post. This is done by removing the unwanted adware from the machine.

Those that have been following this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Not long ago I dedicated a few of my lab computers and intentionally installed some adware programs on them. I’ve 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 auto-updates, or if it installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first noticed the bannerflow.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

bannerflow.com was created on 2008-06-03. bannerflow.com resolves to the 94.245.104.73 IP address.

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

BlockAndSurf was the adware that caused the pop-ups in my case. The pop-up was labelled “Ads by BlockAndSurf“.

What label did your pop-up ad have? Please share in the comments below.

The issue with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be initiated by many variants of adware. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups. I’m aware of at least three variants of BlockAndSurf, called NewPlayer, SaferSurf, and CheckMeUp.

So, what can be done to solve the problem? To remove the bannerflow.com 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:

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 add-ons you installed in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Anything in the list that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that didn’t 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 machine at lots of locations where unwanted software is known to hook into your machine. 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 you can see FreeFixer in action removing the adware that caused pop-up ads:

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

Thank you!