Does this sound like your story? You see pop-up advertisements from crookhorn.kim while browsing on web sites that typically 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 crookhorn.kim pop-ups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here is how the crookhorn.kim ad looked like on my computer:

Does this sound like your story, you presumably have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the crookhorn.kim 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 crookhorn.kim pop-up in this blog post.

I found the crookhorn.kim pop-up on one of the lab systems 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 something new has appeared, such as pop-up windows, new tabs in the browsers, injected ads on site that usually don’t show advertisements, or if some new files have been saved to the hard-drive.

crookhorn.kim was created on 2015-02-05. crookhorn.kim and hj6zz.promorewards.crookhorn.kim resolves to the 184.73.247.179 IP address.

So, how do you remove the crookhorn.kim pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the crookhorn.kim ads I had istartsurf, Movie Wizard and MedPlayerNewVersion installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the crookhorn.kim pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

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

To remove the crookhorn.kim popup ads you need to examine your system for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

1. What software do you have installed if you look in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel? Something that you don’t remember installing yourself or that was recently installed?
2. How about your add-ons you installed in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Anything in the list that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that didn’t help, I’d recommend a scan with FreeFixer to manually track down the adware. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I’m working on that scans your computer at lots of locations, such as browser add-ons, processes, Windows services, recently modified files, etc. If you want to get additional details about a file in the scan result, you can click the More Info link for that file and a web page will open up with a VirusTotal report which will be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

   

Here’s a video tutorial which shows FreeFixer in action removing adware that caused pop-up ads:

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

Thank you!