Does this sound like what you are seeing right now? You see pop-up ads from privilegesbox.net while browsing websites that usually don’t advertise in pop-up windows.

The pop-ups manage to bypass the built-in pop-up blockers in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Maybe the privilegesbox.net pop-ups show up when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups show up even when you’re not browsing?

Here another privilegesbox.net pop up ad:

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your computer, you presumably have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the privilegesbox.net ads. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the website you were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you to remove the privilegesbox.net pop-ups in this blog post.

If you have been reading this blog already know this, but if you are new: Recently I dedicated some of my lab machines and knowingly installed some adware programs on them. I have been monitoring the behaviour on these systems 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 machines. I first observed the privilegesbox.net pop-up on one of these lab computers.

privilegesbox.net resolves to the 162.159.246.105 IP address. privilegesbox.net was registered on 2014-12-30.

So, how do you remove the privilegesbox.net pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the privilegesbox.net ads I had istartsurf, MedPlayerNewVersion and Movie Wizard installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the privilegesbox.net pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

If you are wonder if there are many others out there also getting the privilegesbox.net ads, the answer is probably yes. Check out the traffic rank from Alexa:

The problem with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be launched by many variants of adware, not just the adware on my machine. 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 privilegesbox.net pop-up ads you need to review your machine for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

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 examine the add-ons you installed in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Same thing here, do you see something that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that didn’t solve the problem, 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 on how to remove the pop-ups with FreeFixer:

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

Thank you!