This page shows how to remove s850.thetrafficstat.net from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Did you just see s850.thetrafficstat.net in the statusbar of your browser and wonder where it came from? Or did s850.thetrafficstat.net show up while you search for something on one of the major search engines, such as the Google search engine?

Here’s how the s850.thetrafficstat.net appeared in my network log:

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

• Waiting for s850.thetrafficstat.net…
• Transferring data from s850.thetrafficstat.net…
• Looking up s850.thetrafficstat.net…
• Read s850.thetrafficstat.net
• Connected to s850.thetrafficstat.net…

If you also see this on your computer, you presumably have some potentially unwanted program installed on your computer that makes the s850.thetrafficstat.net domain appear in your browser. There’s no use contacting the owners of the site you currently were browsing. The s850.thetrafficstat.net status bar messages are not coming from them. I’ll try help you to remove the s850.thetrafficstat.net statusbar messages in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: A little while back I dedicated some of my lab computers and intentionally installed some potentially unwanted programs on them. Since then I have been monitoring 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 updates itself, or if it installs additional potentially unwanted programs on the machines. I first observed the s850.thetrafficstat.net in Mozilla Firefox’s status bar on one of these lab computers.

s850.thetrafficstat.net was registered on 2011-01-23. s850.thetrafficstat.net resolves to the 173.45.110.179 IP address.

I’ve also seen the crs.thetrafficstat.net subdomain in use.

So, how do you remove s850.thetrafficstat.net from your browser? On the machine where s850.thetrafficstat.net showed up in the status bar I had CinemaPlus V6 and TornTV installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the web browser from loading data from s850.thetrafficstat.net.

The bad news with status bar messages like the one described in this blog post is that it can be caused by many variants of potentially unwanted programs, not just the potentially unwanted program on my machine. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the status bar messages.

So, what can be done? To remove s850.thetrafficstat.net you need to check your computer for potentially unwanted programs and uninstall them. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

1. Check what programs you have installed in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel. Do you see something that you don’t remember installing or that was recently installed?
2. How about your add-ons you have in your browsers. Anything in the list that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that did not help, I’d recommend a scan with FreeFixer to manually track down the potentially unwanted program. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I’m working on that scans your computer at lots of locations, such as browser add-ons, processes, Windows services, recently modified files, etc. If you want to get additional details about a file in the scan result, you can click the More Info link for that file and a web page will open up with a VirusTotal report which will be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

   

Did this blog post help you to remove s850.thetrafficstat.net? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!