Remove sync.adaptv.advertising.com From Chrome, IE and Firefox

This page shows how to remove sync.adaptv.advertising.com from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Does this sound familiar? You see sync.adaptv.advertising.com in your browser’s status bar while browsing at sites that commonly don’t load any content from third party domains. Maybe the sync.adaptv.advertising.com domain appear when performing a search at the Google search engine?

sync.adaptv.advertising.com status bar

As you can see, this happened while I searched at Google.

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

  • Waiting for sync.adaptv.advertising.com…
  • Transferring data from sync.adaptv.advertising.com…
  • Looking up sync.adaptv.advertising.com…
  • Read sync.adaptv.advertising.com
  • Connected to sync.adaptv.advertising.com…

Does this sound like what you see your computer, you almost certainly have some potentially unwanted program installed on your computer that makes the sync.adaptv.advertising.com domain appear in your browser. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the website you were browsing. The sync.adaptv.advertising.com status bar messages are not coming from them. I’ll try help you to remove the sync.adaptv.advertising.com status bar messages in this blog post.

Those that have been reading this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Not long ago I dedicated a few of my lab machines and intentionally installed a few potentially unwanted programs on them. Since then I’ve been tracking the behaviour 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 updates itself automatically, or if it installs additional software on the computers. I first found sync.adaptv.advertising.com in Mozilla Firefox’s status bar on one of these lab computers.

sync.adaptv.advertising.com resolves to the 216.52.92.110 address and advertising.com to 64.12.89.186. sync.adaptv.advertising.com was created on 1998-06-08.

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

If you are wondering if there are many others out seeing sync.adaptv.advertising.com in the browser, the answer is probably yes. Check out the traffic rank from Alexa:

The problem with status bar 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 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 sync.adaptv.advertising.com you need to check your system for potentially unwanted programs and uninstall them. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

  1. What software do you have installed if you look in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel? Something that you don’t remember installing yourself or that was recently installed?
  2. You can also check the web browser add-ons. Same thing here, do you see anything that you don’t remember installing?
  3. If that didn’t solve the problem, 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:

    FreeFixer More Info link example
    An example of FreeFixer’s “More Info” links. Click for full size.

Did you find any potentially unwanted program on your machine? Did that stop sync.adaptv.advertising.com? Please post the name of the potentially unwanted program you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!

2 thoughts on “Remove sync.adaptv.advertising.com From Chrome, IE and Firefox

Comments are closed.