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

Here’s a screenshot of the quizonaut.com pop-up ad when it showed up on my machine:

(Sorry for the ridiculous use of watermarks. I have to do it to stop the copy-cats.)

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your computer, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the quizonaut.com ads. Contacting the owner of the website would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the ads. I’ll do my best to help you remove the quizonaut.com pop-up in this blog post.

Those that have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but here we go: Some time ago I dedicated a few of my lab systems and wilfully installed some adware programs on them. I’ve been tracking 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 and installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first noticed the quizonaut.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

quizonaut.com was created on 2012-01-10. se.quizonaut.com and quizonaut.com resolves to the 191.235.217.33 IP address. According to YouGetSignal’s reverse service the following sites are also located on the same server:

• chargebackhandler.com
• dentalguide.com
• es.quizonaut.com
• feedback47.com
• hardbouncer.com
• www.subscriptionselfservice.com

So, how do you remove the quizonaut.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the quizonaut.com ads I had istartsurf, MedPlayerNewVersion and Movie Wizard installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the quizonaut.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.

So, what can be done? To remove the quizonaut.com pop-up ads you need to review your system for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

The first thing I would do to remove the quizonaut.com pop-ups is to examine the software installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can open this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows you can just type in “uninstall” in the Control Panel’s search field to find that dialog:

Click on the “Uninstall a program” link and the Uninstall programs dialog will open up:

Do you see something dubious listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed approximately about the same time as you started seeing the quizonaut.com pop-ups.

Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often show up under the add-ons menu in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Anything that you don’t remember installing?

I think you will be able to track down and uninstall the adware with the steps outlined above, but in case that did not work you can try the FreeFixer removal tool to identify and remove the adware. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I started develop about 8 years ago. It’s a tool built to manually track down and remove unwanted software. When you’ve tracked down the unwanted files you can simply tick a checkbox and click on the Fix button to remove the unwanted file.

FreeFixer’s removal feature is not locked down like many other removal tools out there. It will not require you to pay for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having problems figuring out if a file is clean or adware in FreeFixer’s scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your browser with a page which contains more details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:

Here you can see FreeFixer in action removing pop-up ads:

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

Thank you!