This page shows how to remove a.visadd.com from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Does this sound like what you are seeing right now? You see a.visadd.com in your web browser’s status bar while browsing web sites that usually don’t load any content from third party domains. Perhaps the visadd.com domain show up when performing a search at the Google.com search engine?

Here is a screenshot on a.visadd.com from my computer:

The following are some of the status bar messages you may see in your browser’s status bar:

• Waiting for a.visadd.com…
• Transferring data from a.visadd.com…
• Looking up a.visadd.com…
• Read a.visadd.com
• Connected to a.visadd.com…

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your machine, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your machine that makes the a.visadd.com domain appear in your web browser. So there’s no use contacting the owner of the site you were browsing. The a.visadd.com status bar messages are not coming from them. I’ll try help you with the a.visadd.com removal in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: Some time ago I dedicated a few of my lab computers and wilfully installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I have been tracking the behaviour on these computers to see what kinds of advertisements 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 computers. I first noticed the a.visadd.com in Mozilla Firefox’s statusbar on one of these lab machines.

a.visadd.com resolves to 198.50.249.249 and visadd.com to the 54.235.216.158 IP address. a.visadd.com was registered on 2013-07-11, so it has been around for some time.

So, how do you remove a.visadd.com from your browser? On the machine where a.visadd.com showed up in the status bar I had BrowserWarden, TinyWallet and BlockAndSurf installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the browser from loading data from a.visadd.com.

BrowserWarden was the adware that caused the status bar messages in my case, based on the connection to cdn.visadd.com, which mentions Browser Warden:

The URL also mentions advertising-support.com. cdn.visadd.com resolves to 108.162.200.127.

If you are wondering if there are many others out seeing visadd.com in the browser, the answer is probably yes. Check out the traffic rank from Alexa:

The issue with status bar messages such as this one is that it can be caused by many variants of adware, not just the adware that’s installed on my system. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the status bar messages.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the a.visadd.com removal:

The first thing I would do to remove a.visadd.com is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can find 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 something was installed about the same time as you started observing the a.visadd.com status bar messages.

The next thing to check would be your web browser’s add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons dialog in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Anything that you don’t remember installing?

I think you will be able to find 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. Freefixer is a tool built to manually track down and uninstall 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 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 troubles determining if a file is legitimate or unsafe in FreeFixer’s scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains additional details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop a.visadd.com? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!