Remove tradeadexchange.com from Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer.

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

Did you just see tradeadexchange.com in the status bar of your web browser and wonder where it came from? Or did tradeadexchange.com show up while you searched for something on one of the major search engines, such as the Google search engine?

Here is how the tradeadexchange.com status bar message looked like on my computer:

tradeadexchange.com

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

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

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your computer, you almost certainly have some potentially unwanted program installed on your system that makes the tradeadexchange.com domain appear in your browser. Don’t write angry emails to the site you were browsing, they are most likely not responsible for the tradeadexchange.com status bar messages. The potentially unwanted program on your system is. I’ll do my best to help you remove the tradeadexchange.com message in this blog post.

Those that have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but here we go: Not long ago I dedicated a few of my lab machines and intentionally installed a few potentially unwanted programs on them. I have been tracking the behaviour on these systems 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 installs additional software on the machines. I first found tradeadexchange.com in Mozilla Firefox’s statusbar on one of these lab computers.

tradeadexchange.com was registered on 2015-04-27. www.tradeadexchange.com resolves to the 104.197.47.161 IP address and tradeadexchange.com to 104.197.47.161. It seems the site is getting quite a lot of traffic:

tradeadexchange.com traffic

So, how do you remove tradeadexchange.com from your browser? On the machine where tradeadexchange.com showed up in the status bar I had WNet, ActSys, PlainSavings and CashReminder installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the browser from loading data from tradeadexchange.com.

The issue 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.

So, what can be done to solve the problem? To remove tradeadexchange.com you need to review your machine 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 have in your browsers. Anything in the list 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 tradeadexchange.com? Please post the name of the potentially unwanted program you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!