Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from ixb.petunianeedling.com while browsing on sites that normally don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to find a way round the built-in pop-up blockers in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the ixb.petunianeedling.com pop-ups appear when clicking search results from a Google search? Or does the pop-ups show up even when you’re not browsing?

Here is how the ixb.petunianeedling.com ad looked like on my system:

If this description sounds like your machine, you most likely have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the ixb.petunianeedling.com ads. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the site you currently were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you with the ixb.petunianeedling.com removal in this blog post.

I found the ixb.petunianeedling.com pop-up on one of the lab systems where I have some adware running. I’ve talked about this in some of the previous blog posts. The adware was installed on purpose, and from time to time I check if something new has appeared, such as pop-up windows, new tabs in the browsers, injected ads on website that usually don’t show ads, or if some new files have been saved to the hard-drive.

ixb.petunianeedling.com was created on 2015-07-30. ixb.petunianeedling.com resolves to the 37.58.80.221 IP address. ixb.petunianeedling.com resolves to the same IP.

So, how do you remove the ixb.petunianeedling.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the ixb.petunianeedling.com ads I had PriceFountain, SpeedChecker, YTDownloader and WebWaltz installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the ixb.petunianeedling.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

The problem with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

So, what can be done? To remove the ixb.petunianeedling.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. You can also review the browser add-ons. Same thing here, do you see anything that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that did 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 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’s a video guide showing how to remove pop-up ads with FreeFixer:

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

Thank you!