Are your programs tapping the Internet? Here’s how to find out
I can’t tell you how often I’ve felt that some program I was running on my Vista system was reaching out to the big, bad Internet to do something. It’s an unsettling feeling when you haven’t instructed any program to go out and touch someone, especially when you have no idea what the program is doing. Sometimes they’re reaching out to see if there are any updates available but that’s not always the case. Digital Inspiration comes to our aid with this by pointing out that it’s relatively easy to find out what programs are actively on the Internet at a given moment.
Just type "perfmon" in the Vista search box to run the Reliability and Performance Monitor and then select Network. The resulting pane will reflect all running programs that are actively talking to the Web. This will give you a heads up if there are programs there you don’t think should be talking to the WWW.
James,
Thanks for that. The trouble is, the information you get isn’t very informative. When I did it, I discovered the following were using the network:
LMS.exe
UNS.exe
System
I’m not sure I’m much the wiser for knowing this. If there was a rogue programme operating, how would I know? It’s likely it would have a cryptic name.
Allan
It should be noted that people who do actually have a network will see all apps talking on the network, not just apps that are connected to the internet.
Allan, google LMS.exe and then UNS.exe and you’ll find that both of those are Intel Management utilities. The first is rated as dangerous because it hides itself.
I dunno about you guys, but my heinous-yet-faithful firewall (ZoneAlarm) notifies me about all incoming / outgoing traffic, and I have to explicitly allow applications access to the network in both directions. Is this not a normal firewall feature?
you will need to be a admin of your machine in order to get full access to the network section.
SysInternals offers two tools that I’ve always found a bit more helpful… Process Explorer and TCP View.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx
how about on XP? I typed in perfmon, but there is no “network” to view. Can anyone let me know where to go on XP? thanks
I am with Weylund, there are tools that are meant to do exactly this sort of thing and do it well. If you use e.g. Windows Live OneCare you will be asked when an app wants to access the internet and will have the option of stopping the request.
I don’t care if an application is trying to access the internet, because my firewall blocks everything, and it will asks first if I want to allow net access to an application. If you use Windows XP, install a third-party firewall, because the built-in firewall doesn’t control outbound access. Vista firewall better, but you need to configure it to block outbound access.