Are you getting new tabs or pop-up ads from fixchecker.com claiming that your Flash Player is outdated, while browsing on web sites that generally don’t advertise in pop-up windows. Did the fixchecker.com pop-ups manage to find a way round the built-in pop-up blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Perhaps the fixchecker.com pop-ups appear when clicking search results from the Google search engine? Or does the pop-ups show up even when you’re not browsing?
Here is how the faked Flash Update page at fixchecker.com ad looked like on my computer:
Don’t download the faked Flash update. It’s not the real thing. It’s digitally signed by OOO Gross Mauntin. The real Flash Player should be signed by Adobe.
If this description sounds like your story, you probably have some adware installed on your computer that pop up the fixchecker.com ads. There’s no use contacting the owners of the site you were browsing. The advertisements are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you remove the fixchecker.com pop up in this blog post.
For those that are new to the blog: Some time ago I dedicated a few of my lab machines and purposely installed some adware programs on them. I have been following 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 updates itself, or if it downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the machines. I first noticed the fixchecker.com pop-up on one of these lab systems.
fixchecker.com resolves to 198.7.56.116. fixchecker.com was registered on 2014-11-24.
So, how do you remove the fixchecker.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the fixchecker.com ads I had PriceHorse, Browsers_App_Pro, Lampy Light and Offer Bouleward installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the fixchecker.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.
The issue with this type of pop-up 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.
Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the fixchecker.com ads removal:
The first thing I would do to remove the fixchecker.com pop-ups is to examine the programs 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 about the same time as you started getting the fixchecker.com pop-ups.
Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often show up under the add-ons menu in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there something that looks suspicious? Anything 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’ve developed since 2006. Freefixer is a tool built to manually find and uninstall unwanted software. When you’ve tracked down 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 down 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 hard time figuring out if a file is clean or malware in the FreeFixer scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains additional information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:
Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the fixchecker.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.
Thank you!