This page shows how to remove inst.shoppingate.info from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Did you just see inst.shoppingate.info in the status bar of your browser while you searched at Google and wonder where shoppingate it came from?

Here’s how the inst.shoppingate.info  looked like when I got it in the network log on my computer:

It appeared in the network log while I did a search at Google.com.

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

• Waiting for inst.shoppingate.info…
• Transferring data from inst.shoppingate.info…
• Looking up inst.shoppingate.info…
• Read inst.shoppingate.info
• Connected to inst.shoppingate.info…

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your system, you almost certainly have some potentially unwanted program installed on your system that makes the inst.shoppingate.info domain appear in your web browser. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the website you were browsing. The inst.shoppingate.info status bar messages are not coming from them. I’ll try help you to remove the inst.shoppingate.info status bar messages in this blog post.

Those that have been visiting this blog already know this, but here we go: Not long ago I dedicated a few of my lab systems and intentionally installed a few potentially unwanted programs on them. Since then I have been observing the behaviour on these systems to see what kinds of adverts 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 computers. I first observed the inst.shoppingate.info in Mozilla Firefox’s status bar on one of these lab machines.

inst.shoppingate.info resolves to the 198.232.124.37 address and shoppingate.info to 173.231.156.214. inst.shoppingate.info was registered on 2013-08-13. The Whois info is protected by Domains By Proxy, LLC.

I’ve also spotted the service.shoppingate.info, serviceimg.shoppingate.info, xml.shoppingate.info and settings.shoppingate.info subdomain in use.

According to DomainTools, grubsbook.com and shopforu.biz also resolves to 173.231.156.214.

So, how do you remove inst.shoppingate.info from your web browser? On the machine where inst.shoppingate.info showed up in the status bar I had CinemaPlus V6 and TornTV installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the browser from loading data from inst.shoppingate.info. Based on the network log screenshot above, I think we can assume that CinemaPlus V6 triggered the connection to shoppingate.info.

If you are wondering if there are many others out seeing inst.shoppingate.info in the browser, the answer is probably yes. Check out the traffic rank from Alexa:

The problem with statusbar messages such as this one 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 inst.shoppingate.info removal:

1. Examine 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? Do you see CinemaPlus V6 or TornTV listed there?
2. You can also check the add-ons that you have in your browser. Same thing here, do you see something that you don’t remember installing? TornTV or CinemaPlus?
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 system. 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 inst.shoppingate.info? Please post the name of the potentially unwanted program you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!