Does this sound like your story? You see pop-up advertisements from updater.safeplugin-update.org while browsing web sites that in general don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to bypass the built-in pop-up blockers in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Maybe the updater.safeplugin-update.org pop-ups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups show up even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s how the updater.safeplugin-update.org pop-up looked like when I got it on my system:

The download is called adobe_flash_setup.exe and the file is digitally signed by OOO Mad Advert.

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your computer, you presumably have some adware installed on your system that pops up the updater.safeplugin-update.org ads. Don’t blame the people that runs the web site you were at, the ads are most likely not coming from that web site, but from the adware that’s running on your computer. I’ll try help you with the updater.safeplugin-update.org removal in this blog post.

Those that have been reading this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab systems and purposely installed some adware programs on them. I have been following the behaviour on these computers 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 and installs additional unwanted software on the systems. I first found the updater.safeplugin-update.org pop-up on one of these lab machines.

updater.safeplugin-update.org resolves to 184.154.16.170. updater.safeplugin-update.org was created on 2015-04-21.

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

Judging from Alexa’s traffic rank, updater.safeplugin-update.org is getting quite a lot of traffic:

The problem with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be launched by many variants of adware, not just the adware that’s installed on my computer. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the updater.safeplugin-update.org ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the updater.safeplugin-update.org pop-ups is to examine the software installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can find this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows OS 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 in 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 updater.safeplugin-update.org pop-ups.

Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons menu in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something 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. Freefixer is a tool built to manually find 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 locked like many other removal tools out there. It will not require you to pay a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

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

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

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

Thank you!