This page shows how to remove image2.pubmatic.com from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Does this sound like what you are seeing right now? You see image2.pubmatic.com in your browser’s status bar while browsing sites that mostly don’t load any content from third party domains. Maybe the image2.pubmatic.com domain appear when performing a search at the Google search engine?

Here’s a screen dump of image2.pubmatic.com when it showed up on my computer:

(Sorry for the large watermark. If I don’t add them, the screenshot will be used without attribution at some other blogs)

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

• Waiting for image2.pubmatic.com…
• Transferring data from image2.pubmatic.com…
• Looking up image2.pubmatic.com…
• Read image2.pubmatic.com
• Connected to image2.pubmatic.com…

Does this sound like your machine, you presumably have some potentially unwanted program installed on your machine that makes the image2.pubmatic.com domain appear in your browser. Contacting the owner of the site you were browsing would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the image2.pubmatic.com status bar messages. I’ll do my best to help you with the image2.pubmatic.com removal in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: A little while back I dedicated some of my lab computers and deliberately installed a few potentially unwanted programs on them. Since then I’ve been observing the actions on these computers to see what kinds of ads, if any, 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 software on the machines. I first found image2.pubmatic.com in Mozilla Firefox’s status bar on one of these lab machines.

image2.pubmatic.com resolves to 162.248.16.24. image2.pubmatic.com was registered on 2006-12-29. pubmatic.com.br and pubmatic.cz is also located at the same IP address.

So, how do you remove image2.pubmatic.com from your browser? On the machine where image2.pubmatic.com showed up in the status bar I had YouTubeAdBlocke, SalePlus and IStart 5.3.7 installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the browser from loading data from image2.pubmatic.com.

The image2.pubmatic.com domain is attracting quite a lot of traffic, just check out the Alexa traffic rank:

The problem 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. 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 image2.pubmatic.com 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 browser add-ons. Anything in the list that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that didn’t solve the problem, you can give FreeFixer a try. FreeFixer is built to assist users when manually tracking down potentially unwanted programs. It is a freeware utility that I’ve been working since 2006 and it scans your machine at lots of locations where unwanted software is known to hook into your machine. If you would like to get additional details about a file in FreeFixer’s scan result, you can just click the More Info link for that file and a web page with a VirusTotal report will open up, which can 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 image2.pubmatic.com? Please post the name of the potentially unwanted program you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!