Remove system.donation-tools.org From Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer

This page shows how to remove system.donation-tools.org from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Did you just see system.donation-tools.org in the status bar of your browser and wonder where it came from? Or did system.donation-tools.org show up while you search for something on one of the big search engines, such as the Google.com search engine?

Here’s how the system.donation-tools.org status bar message looked like when I got it on my machine:

Waiting for rsystem.donation-tools.org

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

  • Waiting for system.donation-tools.org…
  • Transferring data from system.donation-tools.org…
  • Looking up system.donation-tools.org…
  • Read system.donation-tools.org
  • Connected to system.donation-tools.org…

If you also see this on your machine, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your machine that makes the system.donation-tools.org domain appear in your browser. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the website you currently were browsing. The system.donation-tools.org status bar messages are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the system.donation-tools.org removal in this blog post.

I found system.donation-tools.org on one of the lab computers where I have some adware running. I’ve talked about this in some of the previous blog posts. The adware was installed on purpose, and from time to time I check if anything new has appeared, such as pop-up windows, new tabs in the browsers, injected ads on site that usually don’t show advertisements, or if some new files have been saved to the hard-drive.

donation-tools.org resolves to the 104.45.135.54 address and system.donation-tools.org to 137.135.41.208. donation-tools.org was created on 2010-10-21.

Update 2015-05-04: I’ve also spotted the cdn2.donation-tools.org (68.232.34.200) subdomain in use:

cdn2.donation-tools.org status bar

So, how do you remove system.donation-tools.org from your browser? On the machine where system.donation-tools.org showed up in the status bar I had TinyWallet, BlockAndSurf and BrowserWarden installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the browser from loading data from system.donation-tools.org.

TinyWallet was the adware that caused the statusbar messages in my case. At least it looks that way, when TinyWallet appeared in a connection to static.donation-tools.org:

static.donation-tools.org connection

static.donation-tools.org resolves to 137.135.132.7.

It seems as system.donation-tools.org is getting some traffic, based on Alexa’s traffic rank:

donation-tools.org traffic rank

The problem with this type of status bar message is that it can be caused by many variants of adware, not just the adware running on my machine. 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 system.donation-tools.org removal:

  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 browser add-ons. Same thing here, do you see something that you don’t remember installing?
  3. If that didn’t help, you can give FreeFixer a try. FreeFixer is built to assist users when manually tracking down adware and other types of unwanted software. 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:

    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 system.donation-tools.org? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!