As most Dopers know, Zone Alarm is a great piece of freeware and really comes in handy. Every day zone alarm alerts me that a program from my machine is trying to access the net. The name of the program has changed eight times and today is going by the name of iic159.exe. The names are usually in that format, they start with the iic followed by 2 or 3 numbers and is always an executable. It is trying to access a specific IP address which belongs to Road Runner, my ISP.
I’ve Googled the names of the executables and nothing gets returned. I run AdAware and nothing untoward comes up. I think that I’ll permanently forbid it access to the net, but since the name keeps changing, it will be an ongoing endevour.
Does anybody have any what this executable is going to do? Or, barring that, what is my ISP doing? Is it some sort of spyware or what? My ISP pinging my machine is one thing, but my computer trying to contact them is something else completely.
Basic: do a virus scan with latest signatures. Run Spybot which sometimes finds things Ad-Aware misses. Search for the filename of the executable sometime - which folder is it in on your hard drive? That may give you a clue.
An executable constantly renaming itself is very virus-like behavior.
More advanced: (only if you know what you’re doing) Find the EXE, open it up in a hex editor, look for readable strings.
I don’t think so. Do a search on the whole thing with the number - no returns from Google. Anyway, why would a driver of any sort be interested in connecting to my ISP?
Darren, thanks, I’ll give Spybot a shot and if that doesn’t work, I’ll open it up. BTW, I have run a virus scan with the latest definitions and nothing came up.
It sounds more like it’s from whatever software you installed from your ISP. You could just ask them about it. You could also poke around and do a “find files” for “iie*.exe” on your hard drive and/or on the ISP install disks.
If you have DSL and are using an ethernet connection to the router, chances are you could just uninstall whatever crap came from your ISP and just use DHCP to auto-connect.
IIC=Intermodulation Interference Calculator. Whether that has any relation to what your exe file, I don’t know. Here’s what the software does:
Given a number of transmitter and receiver frequencies, IIC will perform calculations to determine whether the transmitter frequencies can mix and generate unwanted signals which, if near to any of the receiver frequencies, could cause interference with the signal being received.
So, could be Roadrunner is collecting some kind of data? Maybe someone with more expertise can help.
Thanks for the input. I think I may just email or call their customer service and ask what it is. However, considering the morons that I’ve delt with there in the past, I’m not too hopeful.