Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up advertisements from sender.hstpnetwork.com in new tabs while browsing web sites that mostly don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to bypass the built-in pop-up blockers in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the sender.hstpnetwork.com pop-ups show up when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s a screen capture of the sender.hstpnetwork.com pop-up ad when it showed up on my computer:

Does this sound like what you see your system, you presumably have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the sender.hstpnetwork.com ads. Don’t flame the people that runs the website you were at, the ads are probably not coming from that site, but from the adware that’s running on your computer. I’ll try help you with the sender.hstpnetwork.com removal in this blog post.

Those that have been visiting this blog already know this, but here we go: Some time ago I dedicated some of my lab computers and deliberately installed some adware programs on them. Since then I have been following 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, or if it downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the machines. I first spotted the sender.hstpnetwork.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

hstpnetwork.com resolves to the 188.165.55.191 IP address and so does sender.hstpnetwork.com.

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

The issue with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware, not just the adware running 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 sender.hstpnetwork.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the sender.hstpnetwork.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 OS 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 strange-looking in 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 getting the sender.hstpnetwork.com pop-ups.

Then you can examine you browser add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons dialog in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Anything that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users will be able to find 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 many 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 crippled like many other removal tools out there. It won’t require you to pay for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having difficulties determining if a file is safe or unwanted in the FreeFixer scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains more details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

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

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

Thank you!