Remove s.trk-u.com from Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer

This page shows how to remove s.trk-u.com from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Did you just interrupt your work because you noticed s.trk-u.com in your browser’s status bar? You are not alone. I also got the s.trk-u.com status bar message while browsing. Please read on…

Here’s a screenshot of s.trk-u.com when it showed up on my machine while I did a search at Google:

s.trk-u.com status bar

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

  • Waiting for s.trk-u.com…
  • Transferring data from s.trk-u.com…
  • Looking up s.trk-u.com…
  • Read s.trk-u.com
  • Connected to s.trk-u.com…

By visiting the URL, https://s.trk-u.com, it appears to be a service that reports back Geo location and ISP information for the visitor.

Does this sound like what you see your machine, you presumably have some adware installed on your machine that makes the trk-u.com domain appear in your browser. So don’t send angry emails to the site you were browsing, they are most likely not responsible for the s.trk-u.com status bar messages. The adware on your computer is. I’ll try help you to remove the s.trk-u.com status bar messages in this blog post.

I found s.trk-u.com 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.

s.trk-u.com resolves to 54.197.238.11. s.trk-u.com was created on 2014-11-07. trk-u.com is protected by Domains By Proxy, LLC.

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

The issue with this type of status bar message is that it can be caused by many variants of adware, not just the adware that’s installed on my machine. 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 s.trk-u.com removal:

The first thing I would do to remove s.trk-u.com is to examine the programs 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 OS you can just type in “uninstall” in the Control Panel’s search field to find that dialog:
Uninstall a program search

Click on the “Uninstall a program” link and the Uninstall programs dialog will open up:
Uninstall a program dialog

Do you see something strange-looking listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed approximately about the same time as you started getting the s.trk-u.com status bar messages.

Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons menu in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Anything that you don’t remember installing?
Firefox add-ons manager

I think most users 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 identify and remove unwanted software. When you’ve identified 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 purchase the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having troubles determining 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 details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:

FreeFixer More Info link example
An example of FreeFixer’s “More Info” links. Click for full size.

Did this blog post help you to remove s.trk-u.com? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!