Sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from pcchecker.plugin-update.org while browsing sites that in general don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to bypass the built-in pop-up blockers in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Maybe the pcchecker.plugin-update.org pop-ups show up when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s a screen capture of the plugin-update.org pop-up ad when it showed up on my computer:

Does this sound like what you see your computer, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your system that pops up the pcchecker.plugin-update.org ads. So don’t flame the people that runs the website you were at, the ads are presumably not coming from that website, but from the adware that’s installed on your machine. I’ll try help you to remove the plugin-update.org pop-ups in this blog post.

If you have been reading this blog already know this, but if you are new: A little while back I dedicated some of my lab computers and intentionally installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I have been tracking the behaviour on these computers 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 pcchecker.plugin-update.org pop-up on one of these lab computers.

pcchecker.plugin-update.org resolves to 198.7.56.118. pcchecker.plugin-update.org was created on 2015-01-20.

So, how do you remove the pcchecker.plugin-update.org pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the pcchecker.plugin-update.org ads I had PriceLess, PriceHorse, OfferBoulevard and SpeedCheck installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the pcchecker.plugin-update.org pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

The issue with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be initiated 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 pcchecker.plugin-update.org pop-up ads you need to review your machine 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. You can also check the add-ons that you have in your browser. Same thing here, do you see something that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that did not 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 guide showing how to remove pop-up ads with FreeFixer:

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

Thank you!