Remove vbc.hegemonytangles.com from Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer

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

Does this sound like what you are seeing right now? You see vbc.hegemonytangles.com in your browser’s status bar while browsing web sites that typically don’t load any content from third party domains. Maybe the vbc.hegemonytangles.com domain appear when performing a search at the Google.com search engine?

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

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

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your computer, you most likely have some potentially unwanted program installed on your machine that makes the vbc.hegemonytangles.com domain appear in your browser. So there’s no use contacting the owner of the site you were browsing. The vbc.hegemonytangles.com status bar messages are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you remove the vbc.hegemonytangles.com message in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: Not long ago I dedicated a few of my lab computers and knowingly installed a few potentially unwanted programs on them. I’ve been tracking the actions on these computers 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 updates itself, or if it installs additional software on the machines. I first found vbc.hegemonytangles.com in Mozilla Firefox’s status bar on one of these lab computers.

vbc.hegemonytangles.com resolves to the 5.153.38.134 address. vbc.hegemonytangles.com was registered on 2015-05-13.

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

The problem with status bar messages such as 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 should done to solve the problem? To remove vbc.hegemonytangles.com you need to examine your system for potentially unwanted programs and uninstall them. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

The first thing I would do to remove vbc.hegemonytangles.com 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 OS 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 suspicious listed 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 seeing the vbc.hegemonytangles.com status bar messages.

Then you can examine you browser add-ons. Potentially unwanted programs often appear under the add-ons menu in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Is there something that looks suspicious? Anything that you don’t remember installing?
Firefox add-ons manager

I think most users 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. It’s a tool designed to manually track down 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 for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having a mess determining if a file is legit or potentially unwanted in the FreeFixer scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your browser with a page which contains more information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite 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 vbc.hegemonytangles.com? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!