Sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from up.updatenow24.com while browsing web sites that in general don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to get round the built-in pop-up blockers in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the up.updatenow24.com pop-ups appear when clicking search results from a Google search? Or does the pop-ups show up even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s how the up.updatenow24.com pop-up looked like when I got it on my system:

If this description sounds like what you are seeing, you presumably have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the up.updatenow24.com ads. Contacting the site owner would be a waste of time. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the up.updatenow24.com removal in this blog post.

If you have been following this blog already know this, but if you are new: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab machines and knowingly installed some adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been tracking the actions on these computers to see what kinds of ads that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware auto-updates, or if it downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the systems. I first spotted the up.updatenow24.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

up.updatenow24.com was created on 2014-12-31. up.updatenow24.com resolves to 198.7.56.112.

So, how do you remove the up.updatenow24.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the up.updatenow24.com ads I had Word Proser, Lampy Lighty, PriceLess and SpeedCheck installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the up.updatenow24.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Firefox.

The problem with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be initiated 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 can be done? To remove the up.updatenow24.com pop-up ads you need to examine your machine 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 up.updatenow24.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 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 listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed approximately about the same time as you started getting the up.updatenow24.com pop-ups.

Then you can examine you browser add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons dialog in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Anything that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users will be able to identify 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 about 8 years ago. Freefixer is a tool built to manually identify 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 locked like many other removal tools out there. It won’t require you to pay a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having issues figuring out if a file is clean 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 information 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 you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the up.updatenow24.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!