Remove asrv-a.akamaihd.net from Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer

This page shows how to remove asrv-a.akamaihd.net from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Did you just see asrv-a.akamaihd.net in the status bar of your browser and ask yourself where it came from? Or did asrv-a.akamaihd.net show up while you search for something on one of the major search engines, such as the Google.com search engine?

Here is how the asrv-a.akamaihd.net connection looked like in my network log. The connection was made when I searched at Google.

asrv-a.akamaihd.net

The actual url is https://asrv-a.akamaihd.net/sd/9717/1001.js. When loaded, a code snippet is returned, that mentions the gal.adviceoncarsse.com (37.58.102.34) domain.

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

  • Waiting for asrv-a.akamaihd.net…
  • Transferring data from asrv-a.akamaihd.net…
  • Looking up asrv-a.akamaihd.net…
  • Read asrv-a.akamaihd.net
  • Connected to asrv-a.akamaihd.net…

If this description sounds like your story, you almost certainly have some potentially unwanted program installed on your computer that makes the asrv-a.akamaihd.net domain appear in your browser. So don’t write angry emails to the website you were browsing, they are almost certainly not responsible for the asrv-a.akamaihd.net status bar messages. The potentially unwanted program on your machine is. I’ll do my best to help you with the asrv-a.akamaihd.net removal in this blog post.

If you have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but if you are new: A little while back I dedicated some of my lab machines and knowingly installed some potentially unwanted programs on them. Since then I have been tracking the behaviour on these machines 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 computers. I first noticed the asrv-a.akamaihd.net in Mozilla Firefox’s status bar on one of these lab computers.

asrv-a.akamaihd.net resolves to the 23.62.6.72 address.

So, how do you remove asrv-a.akamaihd.net from your browser? On the machine where asrv-a.akamaihd.net showed up in the status bar I had PriceFountain, WebWaltz, SpeedChecker and YTDownloader installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the browser from loading data from asrv-a.akamaihd.net.

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

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the asrv-a.akamaihd.net removal:

The first thing I would do to remove asrv-a.akamaihd.net is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can open 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:
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 suspicious listed 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 asrv-a.akamaihd.net status bar messages.

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

I think most users will be able to identify 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 many years ago. It’s a tool designed to manually find 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 a hard time determining 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 your web browser with a page which contains additional information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very 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 asrv-a.akamaihd.net? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!