This page shows how to remove feed.k1wmm.com from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.
Does this sound familiar? You see feed.k1wmm.com in your browser’s statusbar while browsing at web sites that in general don’t load any content from third party domains. Perhaps the feed.k1wmm.com domain appear when performing a search at the Google.com search engine?
(Sorry for the watermarks. Need to add them to prevent the most blatant attempts of other bloggers using my screenshots without attribution)
It noticed k1wmm.com in the status bar while browsing at VirusTotal.com.
Here are some of the status bar messages you may see in your browser’s status bar:
- Waiting for feed.k1wmm.com…
- Transferring data from feed.k1wmm.com…
- Looking up feed.k1wmm.com…
- Read feed.k1wmm.com
- Connected to feed.k1wmm.com…
If you also see this on your computer, you apparently have some potentially unwanted program installed on your system that makes the feed.k1wmm.com domain appear in your browser. There’s no use contacting the owners of the web site you were browsing. The feed.k1wmm.com statusbar messages are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you remove the feed.k1wmm.com message in this blog post.
If you have been reading this blog already know this, but if you are new: Not long ago I dedicated a few of my lab machines and intentionally installed some potentially unwanted programs on them. I’ve been following the actions 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 auto-updates, or if it downloads additional software on the systems. I first found feed.k1wmm.com in Mozilla Firefox’s status bar on one of these lab computers.
k1wmm.com resolves to the 107.20.180.9 IP address and feed.k1wmm.com to 107.20.184.136. feed.k1wmm.com was registered on 2015-03-09.
So, how do you remove feed.k1wmm.com from your browser? On the machine where feed.k1wmm.com showed up in the status bar I had Windows Menager, SmartComp Safe Network, gosearch.me and Live Malware Protection installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the browser from loading data from feed.k1wmm.com.
Update 2015-10.27: Judging from Alexa’s traffic rank, feed.k1wmm.com is getting quite a lot of traffic:
From the Alexa traffic chart, it appears that traffic skyrocketed at the end of August 2015.
The problem with this type of statusbar 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 solve the problem? To remove feed.k1wmm.com you need to review your system for potentially unwanted programs and uninstall them. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:
The first thing I would do to remove feed.k1wmm.com is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can reach 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 in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed approximately about the same time as you started getting the feed.k1wmm.com status bar messages.
Then I would check the browser add-ons. Potentially unwanted programs often show up under the add-ons dialog in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?
I think you will be able to find and uninstall 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 about 8 years ago. Freefixer is a tool designed to manually track down 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 will not require you to pay a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.
And if you’re having problems deciding if a file is legit or potentially unwanted in FreeFixer’s scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your browser with a page which contains additional information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:
Did this blog post help you to remove feed.k1wmm.com? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.
Thank you!