Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up advertisements from bestones.net while browsing websites that normally don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to escape the built-in pop-up blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the bestones.net pop-ups appear when clicking search results from a Google search? Or does the pop-ups show up even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s a screenshot of the bestones.net pop-up ad when it showed up on my machine:

The download was digitally signed by Andrey Hmelnikov.

Does this sound like your story, you most likely have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the bestones.net ads. There’s no use contacting the owners of the website you were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you to remove the bestones.net pop-ups in this blog post.

Those that have been visiting this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab computers and intentionally installed some adware programs on them. I have been monitoring the actions on these systems 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 systems. I first observed the bestones.net pop-up on one of these lab machines.

bestones.net resolves to the 54.69.104.255 IP address. bestones.net was registered on 2014-08-21.

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

The issue with pop-ups such as this one 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.

So, what can be done? To remove the bestones.net pop-up ads you need to check your system 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 anything that you don’t remember installing or that was recently installed?
2. You can also check the browser add-ons. Same thing here, do you see something that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that does not 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 computer at lots of locations where unwanted software is known to hook into your computer. 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 on how to remove the pop-ups with FreeFixer:

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

Thank you!