This page shows how to remove utop.it (irismediainc.utop.it, search.utop.it, xml.utop.it) from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

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

Here’s a screengrab of the utop.it domains when they showed up in my network log and in the browser status bar. They appeared while I searched at Google:

xml.utop.it

irismediainc.utop.it

search.utop.it

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

• Waiting for utop.it…
• Transferring data from utop.it…
• Looking up utop.it…
• Read utop.it
• Connected to utop.it…

Does this sound like what you see your computer, you apparently have some potentially unwanted program installed on your system that makes the utop.it domain appear in your browser. So there’s no use contacting the owner of the site you were browsing. The utop.it status bar messages are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the utop.it removal in this blog post.

I found utop.it on one of the lab systems where I have some potentially unwanted programs running. I’ve talked about this in some of the previous blog posts. The potentially unwanted programs was installed on purpose, and from time to time I check if something new has appeared, such as pop-up windows, new tabs in the web browsers, injected ads on website that usually don’t show ads, or if some new files have been saved to the hard-drive.

utop.it was registered on 2012-05-14. utop.it resolves to the 104.20.29.167 IP address.

So, how do you remove utop.it from your browser? On the machine where utop.it showed up in the status bar I had NetMon and Jelbrus Secure Web installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the browser from loading data from utop.it.

The bad news with statusbar messages such as this one is that it can be caused by many variants of potentially unwanted programs, not just the potentially unwanted program running 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 utop.it removal:

1. Check what programs you have installed in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel. Do you see anything that you don’t remember installing or that was recently installed?
2. How about your add-ons you have in your web browsers. Anything in the list that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that does 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 you find any potentially unwanted program on your machine? Did that stop utop.it? Please post the name of the potentially unwanted program you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!