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

Sound familiar? You see secure.adnxs.com in your browser’s status bar while browsing sites that normally don’t load any content from third party domains. Perhaps the secure.adnxs.com domain appear when performing a search at the Google.com search engine?

Here’s a screen capture of secure.adnxs.com when it showed up on my computer in the network log:

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

• Waiting for secure.adnxs.com…
• Transferring data from secure.adnxs.com…
• Looking up secure.adnxs.com…
• Read secure.adnxs.com
• Connected to secure.adnxs.com…

If you also see this on your computer, you presumably have some potentially unwanted program installed on your machine that makes the secure.adnxs.com domain appear in your browser. So there’s no use contacting the owner of the site you were browsing. The secure.adnxs.com statusbar messages are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you remove the secure.adnxs.com message in this blog post.

Those that have been visiting this blog already know this, but for new visitors: A little while back I dedicated a few of my lab computers and deliberately installed some potentially unwanted programs on them. Since then I have been following the actions on these systems 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 automatically, or if it downloads additional potentially unwanted programs on the computers. I first found the secure.adnxs.com in Mozilla Firefox’s statusbar on one of these lab computers.

secure.adnxs.com resolves to the 68.67.176.146 address.

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

Judging from Alexa’s traffic rank, secure.adnxs.com is getting quite a lot of traffic:

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 on my system. 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 secure.adnxs.com you need to check your computer for potentially unwanted programs and uninstall them. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

1. Review 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 installed in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. 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 computer 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 this blog post help you to remove secure.adnxs.com? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!