Did you just get a pop-up or new tab from pc.fastupdatenow.com claiming that your Flash Player might be outdated? Did the pc.fastupdatenow.com 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 pc.fastupdatenow.com pop-up show up while you clicked a link on one of the major search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo?

Here’s a screen capture of the pc.fastupdatenow.com pop-up ad when it showed up on my machine:

This may look like a legitimate Adobe Flash Player update, but it is not. The official flash player should be digitally signed by Adobe Systems Incorporated. The file downloaded from fastupdatenow.com is a fake download. Don’t run it.

Does this sound like what you are seeing, you most likely have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the pc.fastupdatenow.com ads. Contacting the site owner would be a waste of time. The adverts are not coming from them. I’ll try help you to remove the pc.fastupdatenow.com pop-ups in this blog post.

If you have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but if you are new: Not long ago I dedicated a few of my lab machines and intentionally installed some adware programs on them. Since then I have been tracking the actions 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 systems. I first found the pc.fastupdatenow.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

pc.fastupdatenow.com resolves to 198.7.56.111. It was created on the 12th of December, 2014.

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

If you are wonder if there are many others out there also getting the pc.fastupdatenow.com ads, the answer is probably yes. Check out the traffic rank from Alexa:

The issue with pop ups like this one is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware, not just the adware running on my machine. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the pc.fastupdatenow.com ads removal:

1. Examine 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. 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 solve the problem, 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 on how to remove the pop-ups with FreeFixer:

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the pc.fastupdatenow.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!