Did you just get a pop-up survey from healthy-consumer.com and wonder where it came from? Did the healthy-consumer.com ad appear to have been popped up from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use aggressive advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the healthy-consumer.com pop-up show up while you clicked a link on one of the big search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo?
Here is how the healthy-consumer.com ad looked like on my machine:
If you also see this on your machine, you probably have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the healthy-consumer.com 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 healthy-consumer.com removal in this blog post.
Those that have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but here we go: Recently I dedicated some of my lab systems and knowingly installed a few adware programs on them. I have been monitoring 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 automatically, or if it installs additional unwanted software on the machines. I first found the healthy-consumer.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.
healthy-consumer.com resolves to the 104.37.75.5 IP address. healthy-consumer.com was registered on 2013-09-25.
So, how do you remove the healthy-consumer.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the healthy-consumer.com ads I had Unisales and YouTubeAdBlocke installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the healthy-consumer.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.
The problem with pop-ups like the one described in this blog post is that it can be launched by many variants of adware, not just the adware running on my system. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.
Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the healthy-consumer.com ads removal:
The first thing I would do to remove the healthy-consumer.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 Operating System 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 suspicious in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed about the same time as you started seeing the healthy-consumer.com pop-ups.
Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons menu in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?
I think most users will be able to track down 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 track down 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 locked down 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 problems determining if a file is safe or malware in FreeFixer’s scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains more details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:
Here you can see FreeFixer in action removing the adware that caused pop-up ads:
Did this blog post help you to remove the healthy-consumer.com pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.
Thank you!
My name is Chris Sovey, and I own healthyconsumer.com, NOT healthy-consumer.com (with a dash). Please stop wasting our mutual time by sending angry hate mail to my inbox, as I am not responsible for this spam.
Thank you Chris. How often do you get those angry emails from people that thinks the spam comes from your site?