Did you just get a pop-up from dirtlocket.kim and wonder where it came from? Did the dirtlocket.kim 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 dirtlocket.kim pop-up show up while you clicked a link on one of the major search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo?

Here is how the dirtlocket.kim ad looked like on my machine:

If this description sounds like what you are seeing, you presumably have some adware installed on your system that pops up the dirtlocket.kim ads. Don’t send angry emails to the site you were browsing, the ads are almost certainly not coming from them, but from the adware on your machine. I’ll do my best to help you remove the dirtlocket.kim pop-up in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: Recently I dedicated some of my lab machines and deliberately installed some adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been tracking 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 installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first noticed the dirtlocket.kim pop-up on one of these lab machines.

dirtlocket.kim was registered on 2015-02-05. dirtlocket.kim resolves to 184.73.247.179.

So, how do you remove the dirtlocket.kim pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the dirtlocket.kim ads I had TinyWallet, BlockAndSurf and BrowserWarden installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the dirtlocket.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 popped up 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 solve the problem? To remove the dirtlocket.kim pop-up ads you need to review your computer for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

The first thing I would do to remove the dirtlocket.kim pop-ups is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can open 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 strange-looking in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed about the same time as you started getting the dirtlocket.kim 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 uninstall 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 built to manually find and remove unwanted software. When you’ve identified 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 pay a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having issues deciding if a file is legitimate or adware in FreeFixer’s 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 quite useful:

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 dirtlocket.kim pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!