Did you just get a pop-up from ssl.winupdate24.com and wonder where it came from? Did the ssl.winupdate24.com ad appear to have been initiated from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use aggressive advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the ssl.winupdate24.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 how the ssl.winupdate24.com pop-up looked like when I got it on my machine:

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your machine, you probably have some adware installed on your system that pops up the winupdate24.com 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 ssl.winupdate24.com pop-up in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: Not long ago I dedicated some of my lab machines and intentionally installed some adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been observing the actions on these machines to see what kinds of ads that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware updates itself, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the machines. I first observed the ssl.winupdate24.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

ssl.winupdate24.com was registered on 2015-01-05. ssl.winupdate24.com resolves to the 198.7.56.116 address.

So, how do you remove the ssl.winupdate24.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the ssl.winupdate24.com ads I had PriceHorse, PriceLess, SpeedCheck and OfferBoulevard installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the ssl.winupdate24.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Firefox.

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

So, what should done to solve the problem? To remove the ssl.winupdate24.com pop-up ads you need to review your system 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 ssl.winupdate24.com pop-ups is to examine the software installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can reach 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 approximately about the same time as you started getting the ssl.winupdate24.com pop-ups.

The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Adware often show up under the add-ons menu in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think you will be able to find and remove 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 about 8 years ago. It’s a tool built to manually identify and remove 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 crippled like many other removal tools out there. It won’t require you to pay for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having issues figuring out if a file is safe or unsafe in FreeFixer’s scan result, 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 quite useful:

Here’s a video guide showing how to remove pop-up ads with FreeFixer:

Did this blog post help you to remove the winupdate24.com popup ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!