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

Here is a screenshot on the futureupdates.theperfectupdate.net pop-up from my machine:

Does this sound like your experience, you apparently have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the futureupdates.theperfectupdate.net ads. So there’s no use contacting the site owner. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the futureupdates.theperfectupdate.net removal in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: Some time ago I dedicated a few of my lab machines and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. I have been monitoring the behaviour on these machines to see what kinds of adverts 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 futureupdates.theperfectupdate.net pop-up on one of these lab systems.

futureupdates.theperfectupdate.net was registered on 2015-02-20. The domain is protected by PrivacyProtect.org. futureupdates.theperfectupdate.net resolves to the 199.115.114.52 address.

YouGetSignal’s reverse WHOIS states that s.system-update.net resolves to the same IP.

According to Alexa, theperfectupdate.net is getting quite a lot of traffic:

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

The problem with pop-ups such as this one 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 futureupdates.theperfectupdate.net ads removal:

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 review the add-ons you have in your browsers. Same thing here, do you see something that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that didn’t 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 tutorial showing FreeFixer in action removing pop-up ads:

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the futureupdates.theperfectupdate.net ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!