Has your internet connection become slower than it should be? There
may be a chance that you have some malware, spyware, or adware that is
using your internet connection in the background without your knowledge.
Here’s how to see what’s going on under the hood.
How to Check What Your Computer is Connecting To ?
So, how do you find out what the problem is? There is an easy method
using the netstat command from a command prompt window. This works with
Windows 7, Vista, and XP. If you’re still using XP, make sure you are
running at least Service Pack 2.
We will use the netstat command to generate a list of everything that
has made an internet connection in a specified amount of time. To use
the netstat command, you must run the command prompt window as
administrator. Open the Start menu and enter “cmd.exe” in the Search
box. When the results display, right-click on cmd.exe and select Run as
administrator from the popup menu.
If the User Account Control dialog box displays, click Yes to
continue. Note: You may not see this dialog box, depending on your User Account Control settings.
At the command prompt, type the following command and press Enter.
netstat -abf 5 > activity.txt
The –a option shows all connections and listening ports, the –b
option shows you what application is making the connection, and the –f
option displays the full DNS name for each connection option for easier
understanding of where the connections are being made to. You can also
use the –n option if you wish to only display the IP address. The 5
option will poll every 5 seconds for connections to make it more easy to
track what is going on, and the results are then piped into the
activity.txt file.
Wait about two minutes and then press Ctrl + C to stop the recording of data.
Once you’ve finished recording data, you can simply open the
activity.txt file in your favorite editor to see the results, or you can
type activity.txt at the command line to open it in Notepad.
The resulting file will list all processes on your computer
(browsers, IM clients, email programs, etc.) that have made an internet
connection in the last two minutes, or however long you waited before
pressing Ctrl + C. It also lists which processes connected to which
websites.
If you see process names or website addresses with which you are not
familiar, you can search for “what is (name of unknown process)” in
Google and see what it is. It may be a system function you don’t know
about or a function of one of your running programs. However, if it
seems like a bad site, you can use Google again to find out how to get
rid of it.
Using CurrPorts to Check What Your PC is Connecting To
You can also use a free tool, called CurrPorts, to display a list of
all currently opened TCP/IP and UDP ports on your local computer. It is a
portable program and doesn’t need to be installed. To use it, extract
the .zip file you downloaded (see the link at the end of this article)
and run cports.exe.
For each port that CurrPorts lists, information about the process
that opened the port is displayed. You can select connections and close
them, copy a port’s information to the clipboard or save it to an HTML
file, an XML file, or a tab-delimited text file. You can reorder the
columns displayed on the CurrPorts main window and in the files you
save. To sort the list by a specific column, simply click on the header
of that column.
CurrPorts runs under Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows
Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. There is
a separate download of CurrPorts for 64-bit versions of Windows. You
can find more information about CurrPorts and how to use it on the
website listed below.
