Who or what is your computer talking to right now? You may think that just because your web browser or email program is not running your PC is offline. Think again. If you have a broadband connection then the chances are it is constantly chattering away, sending and receiving data. Most of it is innocuous and your Firewall and security programs should block the really bad stuff but there’s a lot of other, sometimes mysterious communications going on in the background, which could be slowing your connection down, or maybe aeven malware sending your personal details to heaven knows where.

Here’s a way to find out what’s going on. Go to Run on the Start menu and type cmd then press OK and this will open a DOS like Command window. (more…)

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In a worst case scenario, a piece of malicious code such as a Trojan Horse or a Downloader has infected your machine and is communicating via your Internet connection. Your computer could be a zombie machine in a botnet network, spamming immense quantities of emails and drastically impacting the performance of the operating system. Fortunately, both Windows Vista and Windows XP provide you with the means to monitor your Internet activity.

Netstat is a command line utility designed to allow you a closer view at “protocol statistics and current TCP/IP network connections. The netstat utility displays active TCP connections, ports on which the computer is listening, Ethernet statistics, the IP routing table, IPv4 statistics (for the IP, ICMP, TCP, and UDP protocols), and IPv6 statistics (for the IPv6, ICMPv6, TCP over IPv6, and UDP over IPv6 protocols).” (more…)

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