Did you just get a pop-up from plarium.com and wonder where it came from? Did the plarium.com ad appear to have been launched from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use aggressive advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the plarium.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 plarium.com pop-up looked like when I got it on my computer:

The ad is for the Stormfall Age of War game. The URL mentions the adcash.com domain.

If this description sounds like your system, you most likely have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the plarium.com ads. There’s no use contacting the owners of the web site you currently were browsing. The advertisements are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you remove the plarium.com pop-up in this blog post. This is done by cleaning your computer from the unwanted adware.

If you have been following this blog already know this, but if you are new: Not long ago I dedicated a few of my lab machines and purposely installed some adware programs on them. I have been observing 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 auto-updates, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the computers. I first found the plarium.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

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

It seems as plarium.com is getting quite a lot of traffic, based on Alexa’s traffic rank:

The problem with this type of pop-up is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

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

The first thing I would do to remove the plarium.com pop-ups is to examine the software installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can reach 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 suspicious listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed approximately about the same time as you started seeing the plarium.com pop-ups.

The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Adware often show up under the add-ons dialog in Chrome, Firefox, 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 find 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 many years ago. It’s a tool designed to manually identify and uninstall unwanted software. When you’ve found 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 will not require you to purchase the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having problems determining if a file is clean or unwanted in the FreeFixer scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your web browser with a page which contains additional 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 the adware that caused pop-up ads:

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

Thank you!