This page shows how to remove hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Did you just see hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net in the status bar of your web browser and ponder where it came from? Or did hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net show up while you searched for something on one of the major search engines, such as the Google.com search engine?

Here’s a screenshot of hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net when it showed up on my system:

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

• Waiting for hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net…
• Transferring data from hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net…
• Looking up hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net…
• Read hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net
• Connected to hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net…

If this description sounds like your computer, you probably have some potentially unwanted program installed on your computer that makes the hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net domain appear in your browser. Don’t blame the people that runs the web site you were at when you first spotted hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net in the status bar. They are presumably not responsible, but from the potentially unwanted program that’s installed on your system. I’ll try help you with the hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net removal in this blog post.

Those that have been visiting this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Not long ago I dedicated a few of my lab systems and knowingly installed a few potentially unwanted programs on them. Since then I’ve been monitoring the behaviour on these machines to see what kinds of advertisements, if any, that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the potentially unwanted program updates itself automatically, or if it downloads additional software on the computers. I first spotted hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net in Mozilla Firefox’s status bar on one of these lab computers.

So, how do you remove hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net from your browser? On the machine where hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net showed up in the statusbar I had PriceFountain, SpeedChecker, YTDownloader and WebWaltz installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the browser from loading data from hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net.

The issue with this type of status bar message 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 status bar messages.

So, what can be done? To remove hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net you need to check your system for potentially unwanted programs and uninstall them. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

The first thing I would do to remove hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can find this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows Operating System 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 listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed approximately about the same time as you started seeing the hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net status bar messages.

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

I think most users will be able to track down and remove 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. Freefixer is a tool designed to manually find 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 problems figuring out if a file is legit 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 very useful:

Did you find any potentially unwanted program on your machine? Did that stop hdapp1008-a.akamaihd.net? Please post the name of the potentially unwanted program you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!

Update Oct 7 2015: I’ve also seen hdapp1003-a.akamaihd.net in use.