Sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from online.freeupgradeweb.com about a “new Flash Player” while browsing websites that normally don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to find a way round the built-in pop-up blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the freeupgradeweb.com pop-ups show up when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups show up even when you’re not browsing?

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

Does this sound like what you see your computer, you presumably have some adware installed on your system that pops up the freeupgradeweb.com ads. Contacting the owner of the site would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the ads. I’ll try help you to remove the online.freeupgradeweb.com pop-ups in this blog post.

Those that have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but for new visitors: A little while back I dedicated a few of my lab systems and wilfully installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been monitoring the behaviour 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 installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first noticed the online.freeupgradeweb.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

online.freeupgradeweb.com resolves to the 199.115.114.52 address. online.freeupgradeweb.com was registered on 2015-01-26. freeupgradeweb.com is getting quite a lot of traffic according to the Alexa traffic rank:

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

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

So, what should done to solve the problem? To remove the online.freeupgradeweb.com pop-up ads you need to review your system for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

1. Examine 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 something that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that didn’t help, you can give FreeFixer a try. FreeFixer is built to assist users when manually tracking down adware and other types of unwanted software. It is a freeware utility that I’ve been working since 2006 and it scans your machine at lots of locations where unwanted software is known to hook into your system. If you would like to get additional details about a file in FreeFixer’s scan result, you can just click the More Info link for that file and a web page with a VirusTotal report will open up, which can be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

   

Here’s a video tutorial showing FreeFixer in action removing pop-up ads:

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

Thank you!