Did you just get a pop-up or a new tab from updateschecker.com and ask yourself where it came from? Did the updateschecker.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 updateschecker.com pop-up show up while you clicked a link on one of the major search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo.?

Here’s how the updateschecker.com pop-up looked like when I got it on my machine:

The site promotes a fake Flash Installer, digitally signed by OOO Gross Mauntin.

If this description sounds like your story, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your system that pop up the updateschecker.com ads. So don’t write angry emails to the site you were browsing, the ads are presumably not coming from them, but from the adware on your system. I’ll do my best to help you remove the updateschecker.com in this blog post.

Those that have been reading this blog already know this, but for new visitors: A little while back I dedicated a few of my lab machines and deliberately installed some adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been following 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 updates itself automatically, or if it downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first observed the updateschecker.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

updateschecker.com resolves to the 198.7.56.116 IP address. updateschecker.com was registered on 2014-11-24. There are a bunch of other domain on the same IP, which appears to be related: required-soft.com, softwarerequired.com and updaterequired.net.

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

The issue with this type of pop-up 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.

To remove the updateschecker.com pop-up ads you need to check your machine for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

1. Review what programs you have installed in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel. Do you see something that you don’t remember installing or that was recently installed?
2. You can also examine the add-ons you installed in your browsers. Same thing here, do you see anything that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that did not help, I’d recommend a scan with FreeFixer to manually track down the adware. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I’m working on that scans your computer at lots of locations, such as browser add-ons, processes, Windows services, recently modified files, etc. If you want to get additional details about a file in the scan result, you can click the More Info link for that file and a web page will open up with a VirusTotal report which will be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

   

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

Thank you!