This page shows how to remove c.ztstatic.com from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.
Did you just see c.ztstatic.com in the status bar of your browser or in the network log and wonder where it came from? Or did c.ztstatic.com show up while you searched for something on one of the big search engines, such as the Google.com search engine?
Here is how the c.ztstatic.com appeared in my network log on my computer, when I did a Google search:
The actual URL was https://c.ztstatic.com/tas/www.google.se
Here are some of the status bar messages you may see in your browser’s status bar:
- Waiting for c.ztstatic.com…
- Transferring data from c.ztstatic.com…
- Looking up c.ztstatic.com…
- Read c.ztstatic.com
- Connected to c.ztstatic.com…
If you also see this on your machine, you most likely have some potentially unwanted program installed on your computer that makes the c.ztstatic.com domain appear in your web browser. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the website you currently were browsing. The c.ztstatic.com status bar notifications are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the c.ztstatic.com removal in this blog post.
Those that have been reading this blog already know this, but here we go: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab computers and purposely installed a few potentially unwanted programs on them. Since then I have been following 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 potentially unwanted program auto-updates, or if it installs additional potentially unwanted programs on the machines. I first spotted the c.ztstatic.com in Mozilla Firefox’s status bar on one of these lab machines.
c.ztstatic.com was created on 2012-01-07. c.ztstatic.com resolves to the 172.231.250.31 IP address and ztstatic.com to 52.0.106.150. The domain owner is protected by Domains By Proxy LLC.
So, how do you remove c.ztstatic.com from your browser? On the machine where c.ztstatic.com showed up in the statusbar I had TinyWallet, BlockAndSurf and BrowserWarden installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the web browser from loading data from c.ztstatic.com.
The bad news with this type of status bar notification is that it can be caused by many variants of potentially unwanted programs, not just the potentially unwanted program that’s installed on my machine. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the statusbar messages.
So, what can be done to solve the problem? To remove c.ztstatic.com you need to check your machine for potentially unwanted programs and uninstall them. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:
The first thing I would do to remove c.ztstatic.com is to examine the software 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 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 strange-looking in 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 c.ztstatic.com status bar messages.
Then I would check the browser add-ons. Potentially unwanted program often appear under the add-ons menu in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Is there something that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?
I think you will be able to find and uninstall the potentially unwanted program with the steps outlined above, but in case that did not work you can try the FreeFixer removal tool to identify and remove the potentially unwanted program. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I started develop about 8 years ago. It’s a tool designed to manually track down and uninstall unwanted software. When you’ve tracked down 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 crippled 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 figuring out if a file is legitimate or potentially unwanted in FreeFixer’s scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains additional information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:
Did you find any potentially unwanted program on your machine? Did that stop c.ztstatic.com? Please post the name of the potentially unwanted program you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.
Thank you!