Remove srstats-a.akamaihd.net from Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer

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

Did you just interrupt your work because you noticed srstats-a.akamaihd.net in your web browser’s status bar? You are not alone. I also got the srstats-a.akamaihd.net status bar message while browsing. Please read on…

Here’s a screen capture of srstats-a.akamaihd.net when it showed up on my computer:

srstats-a.akamaihd.net connection

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

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

If this description sounds like your system, you almost certainly have some potentially unwanted program installed on your machine that makes the srstats-a.akamaihd.net domain appear in your browser. So don’t send angry emails to the site you were browsing, they are almost certainly not responsible for the srstats-a.akamaihd.net status bar messages. The potentially unwanted program on your computer is. I’ll do my best to help you remove the srstats-a.akamaihd.net message in this blog post.

Those that have been following this blog already know this, but here we go: Not long ago I dedicated a few of my lab machines and deliberately installed some potentially unwanted programs on them. I have been following the behaviour on these computers 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, or if it installs additional potentially unwanted programs on the machines. I first noticed the srstats-a.akamaihd.net in Mozilla Firefox’s status bar on one of these lab machines.

srstats-a.akamaihd.net resolves to the 23.62.7.152 IP address.

So, how do you remove srstats-a.akamaihd.net from your browser? On the machine where srstats-a.akamaihd.net showed up in the status bar I had SpeedChecker, WebWaltz, YTDownloader and PriceFountain installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the browser from loading data from srstats-a.akamaihd.net. From the URLs shown in the screenshot above, it appears WebWaltz is responsible.

The bad news with status bar messages like 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.

To remove srstats-a.akamaihd.net you need to review your machine for potentially unwanted programs and uninstall them. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

The first thing I would do to remove srstats-a.akamaihd.net is to examine the software 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 you can just type in “uninstall” in the Control Panel’s search field to find that dialog:
Uninstall a program search

Click on the “Uninstall a program” link and the Uninstall programs dialog will open up:
Uninstall a program dialog

Do you see something dubious in 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 observing the srstats-a.akamaihd.net status bar messages.

Then I would check the web browser add-ons. Potentially unwanted program often turn up under the add-ons dialog in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?
Firefox add-ons manager

I think most users will be able to identify 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. It’s a tool built to manually find and uninstall unwanted software. When you’ve identified 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 a mess deciding if a file is legitimate 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 more information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

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

Did this blog post help you to remove srstats-a.akamaihd.net? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!