Did you just get a pop-up from tracking.ibexnetwork.com and wonder where it came from? Did the tracking.ibexnetwork.com ad appear to have been popped up from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use aggressive advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the tracking.ibexnetwork.com pop-up show up while you clicked a link on one of the big search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo?

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

After a while, the pop-up opened the option.fm page where the actual ad was displayed.

Does this sound like what you are seeing, you probably have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the tracking.ibexnetwork.com ads. There’s no use contacting the owners of the site you currently were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you with the tracking.ibexnetwork.com removal in this blog post.

If you have been reading this blog already know this, but if you are new: A little while back I dedicated a few of my lab machines and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I have been tracking the actions on these machines to see what kinds of ads that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware updates itself, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the computers. I first noticed the tracking.ibexnetwork.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

tracking.ibexnetwork.com resolves to the 54.173.20.116 IP address and ibexnetwork.com to 50.7.157.124. tracking.ibexnetwork.com was created on 2012-01-16.

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

The issue with pop-ups like the one described in this blog post is that it can be initiated by many variants of adware, not just the adware on my machine. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the tracking.ibexnetwork.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the tracking.ibexnetwork.com pop-ups is to examine the programs 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 observing the tracking.ibexnetwork.com pop-ups.

Then you can examine you browser add-ons. Adware often show up under the add-ons menu in Firefox, 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 remove 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 won’t require you to pay a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

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

Here’s a video tutorial on how to remove the pop-ups with FreeFixer:

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

Thank you!