How can I identify what is accessing the internet?

Jan 28, 2006 10 Replies
How can I identify what is accessing the internet? open original image

At times my dialup connection window indicates a lot of communication with the internet. I suspect that it is some program wanting to update itself. I thought I had all automatic updates turned off.



How can I identify what is accessing the internet?



And what address it is connecting to?



Stan Hilliard Win98SE


Active Ports and Process Explorer and both are free along with the other tools be talked about in the link.

Long

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Short

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Duane :)

That only shows you what's doing it and may not tell one who is doing it.

sysinternals too

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Not only does one have to see it with something like TCPview or Active Ports, one may have to look inside the running process and see what process that one doesn't see that may be asking the process to do it.

You know it's all about the methods and those preposterous processes.

Duane :)

Jeff,

Apologies for jumping in, but I wanted to thank you for posting that link. Nice utility, especially as it's just a single .EXE and doesn't need to be "installed"!

Jim

Just to add a further question to the OP's original request:-

Software mentioned in the replies I've seen included:-

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Do any of these generate a log, so that you can identify applications which operate briefly, then close down?

cheers,

John S

No not that I know about. If you have a NT based O/S such as Win 2K or XP, then you can enable its Audit features that will log activities of program starting and stopping things of that nature in the Event Logs.

Duane :)

create a script while { ps -afW >>my.log # widows ps -aux >>my.log # linux netstat -a >>my.log sleep 2 }

you can later correlate the pids of course this will consume HD like crazy and when there's no problems, this is EXTREMELY wasteful

none needed ... this is a public sandbox :-)

ah the beauty of portable programming techniques :-)

All those links seem to be for NT, 2K, and XP. I have Win98SE. Is there any one of them that will, for 98SE, show not only the port but the process and path to the DLL?

Stan Hilliard

====== >At times my dialup connection window indicates a lot of communication

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