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I am having trouble with adware specifically the update adobe required, I know its something dumb I did. Being kind of a beginner I would like to see if anybody has a way to find and remove this pain in the behind. I did run clamav with 0 results, any ideas?

In more detail I have an old Dell D-500 recently tuned by our local computer person, everything had been ticking along just fine with the exception of occasional hesitation during video playback Youtube, facebook or similar, recently after loaning it to a visitor I noticed that links from facebook would display the "flashplayer update required" having read about adware virus by Adobe sites I tried a few suggested solutions with no luck.

I have installed clamav and run complete scan with no luck, removed and re- installed flash from Ubuntu downloads no luck, every thing else seems to be OK and can play shooter games alright, but still stuck on the playback problem. I may be completely wrong about the problem altogether just don't know what to try next.

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    adobe flash isnt doing updates since version 11. You will get security warnings. Thats just how it is going to be.
    – j0h
    Feb 5, 2015 at 19:51
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    The problem is not the communities inability to answer, we have nothing to go on. What exactly are you getting? A window popup? Out of date browser plugin? Browser redirect? Have you installed that may have caused this? Any system changes just before it began? A screenshot may be handy. There may be solutions already on this site as well, is this your problem?
    – willl459
    Feb 5, 2015 at 21:33
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    I will check the questions in more detail was overwelmed by the sheer volume of them
    – Bret Brewster
    Feb 6, 2015 at 17:48
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    firefox or chrome or chromimum
    – Mateo
    Feb 6, 2015 at 18:01
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    You could switch to html 5 to play youtube. As far as, flash , it's a huge bummer that Adobe isn't developing it for linux anymore, so warnings will be there.
    – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy
    Feb 6, 2015 at 23:35

2 Answers 2

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Just to clarify what @j0h and @Serg said in their comments and to try to clear up all the confusion, The Adobe Flash security warnings are not a sign of an adware infection. It's highly unlikely that you have any infection at all as in order to effect the operating system your sudo password would be required. The links from facebook are flashing warnings about a security update because a newer version of flash is available for Microsoft Windows (which is easily infected) I wouldn't be concerned about those warnings. In fact the worst I've ever seen on an Ubuntu system is a home page hijack which was easily resolved by changing the home page back.

The choppiness on playback is a different issue entirely, likely caused by insufficient hardware specs or a video driver issue.

If you are using Firefox, Find updates for installed plugins at http://mozilla.com/plugincheck and you can look at existing plugins by typing about:plugins in the address bar.

If you are using Google Chrome, flash is integrated and chrome should automatically update to resolve the issue.

Source: https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/flash-player-google-chrome.html

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    I remember reading long ago that Google Chrome (what the OP seems to use) comes with it's own version of Flash, which is updated through Chrome's update mechanism on Linux. However I just stumbled on Flash plugin up to date but Firefox keeps telling me that I have the old version and thought it's probably worth a mention.
    – LiveWireBT
    Feb 7, 2015 at 8:04
  • @LiveWireBT definitely worth mentioning. My informataion indicates that the latest plugin for Firefox is Version: 11.2.202.442
    – Elder Geek
    Feb 7, 2015 at 14:08
  • I will try these solutions today and report back, thanks again,
    – Bret Brewster
    Feb 8, 2015 at 14:57
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As far as I understood you loaned it to a visitor who probably didn't know how to use the Internet and they didn't use the guest account, but a user or administrator account and now the browser is acting up (adware/malware) for this account?

Are other browsers and users affected? If not, deleting/moving/renaming settings and cache should be the solution. Close the affected browser, open the file manager and display hidden files (Ctrl+H in Nautilus, the default Ubuntu desktop file manager) and rename the corresponding folders. For the different browsers, this would be:

Firefox

.cache/mozilla/firefox
.mozilla/firefox

Chromium

.cache/chromium
.config/chromium

Google Chrome

.cache/google-chrome
.config/google-chrome

For example Google Chrome you could reanme .cache/google-chrome to .cache/google-chrome-malware and .config/google-chrome to .config/google-chrome-malware

To clarify, this is just about trying to remove possible malicous content from the browser. If sites that use plugins like Flash are choppy or buggy this isn't meant to solve this.

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  • As I am normally the only user Its not setup for a user account, I dont know for sure that that use was the cause for these issues, firefox still plays but somewhat choppy and not synced sound to image. When you say deleting/moving settings and cache does that mean from each browser enter these commands in address bar then delete move what? tried that from terminal then? that shows .cache/mozilla/firefox is a directory, so still stumped, as I said before I am not very savvy regarding computers, but give me a horse...
    – Bret Brewster
    Feb 6, 2015 at 21:02
  • @BretBrewster Sorry for being this imprecise. I updated my answer to make more clear what I mean and what my answer is trying to solve.
    – LiveWireBT
    Feb 6, 2015 at 21:21
  • Thank you ahead for your time and effort to try and help me.
    – Bret Brewster
    Feb 6, 2015 at 22:45

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