Remove online-soft.onlineupgradenow.com “Flash Player” Pop Up Ads

Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from online-soft.onlineupgradenow.com while browsing at websites that usually don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to escape the built-in pop-up blockers in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the onlineupgradenow.com pop-ups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here is how the online-soft.onlineupgradenow.com ad looked like on my computer:

Does this sound like what you see your computer, you presumably have some adware installed on your system that pops up the online-soft.onlineupgradenow.com ads. So there’s no use contacting the site owner. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you with the online-soft.onlineupgradenow.com removal in this blog post.

I found the onlineupgradenow.com pop-up on one of the lab computers where I have some adware running. I’ve talked about this in some of the previous blog posts. The adware was installed on purpose, and from time to time I check if anything new has appeared, such as pop-up windows, new tabs in the browsers, injected ads on web site that usually don’t show ads, or if some new files have been saved to the hard-drive.

online-soft.onlineupgradenow.com resolves to the 198.7.56.108 IP address. online-soft.onlineupgradenow.com was created on 2015-01-08.

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

The online-soft.onlineupgradenow.com domain is attracting quite a lot of traffic, just check out the Alexa traffic rank:

The issue with this type of pop-up is that it can be popped up 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 online-soft.onlineupgradenow.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the online-soft.onlineupgradenow.com pop-ups is to examine the software installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can open 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 dubious listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed about the same time as you started observing the online-soft.onlineupgradenow.com pop-ups.

Then you can examine you browser add-ons. Adware often turn up under the add-ons menu in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users will be able to track down 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 track down and remove unwanted software. When you’ve found 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 purchase the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having difficulties deciding if a file is legitimate or malware in FreeFixer’s scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your web browser with a page which contains additional information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful: