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

Here is a screenshot on the secure.win-update.com pop-up from my computer:

Does this sound like your machine, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the secure.win-update.com ads. Contacting the owner of the site would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the advertisements. I’ll try help you with the secure.win-update.com removal in this blog post.

I found the secure.win-update.com pop-up on one of the lab computers 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 anything new has appeared, such as pop-up windows, new tabs in the browsers, injected ads on site that usually don’t show ads, or if some new files have been saved to the hard-drive.

secure.win-update.com was created on 2015-01-05. secure.win-update.com resolves to the 199.115.114.53 address.

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

The problem 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 running on my system. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the secure.win-update.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the secure.win-update.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 strange-looking 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 getting the secure.win-update.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? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users 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’ve developed since 2006. Freefixer is a tool designed to manually track down and uninstall unwanted software. When you’ve identified 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 deciding if a file is clean or malware in FreeFixer’s scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains additional information 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 secure.win-update.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!