It seems like the little tray icon is always flashing, and packets are always being sent back and forth, even when I am doing nothing on the internet.
Is there some free utility that will show me what program or process is doing this?
There’s Wireshark, but it’s not really geared to the end-user.
(Assuming Windows 7)
Just open the Task Manager. Go to the Performance tab. At the bottom of the window, click on Resource Monitor.
In the Resource Monitor window, select the Network tab. After a few seconds, you’ll see a list of programs with current network activity.
If you see entries for svchost.exe, those are actually services, which you may be able to track down by process ID (PID) by going back to Task Manager, under the Services tab.
It is XP. :rolleyes: Nothing I can do about that at the moment.
With a firewall program, you can limit internet access to only those things you specifically allow. Plus, you can view the logs to see what is being granted/denied access.
WireShark will give you the complete run-down, and it’s not impossible to learn to use.
You can also go into the command prompt (windows + r, “cmd”) and type “netstat” to see where the communications are going, but not which programs launched them.
If you are using windows, download Fiddler, I think that there is another one for Mac. It will show you all the traffic and activity of cookies, etc.
You may be surprised at all the hidden traffic going on.
I opened Fiddler when I made the post above and Fiddler has now recorded well over 1000 traffic events, mostly from cookies and adware.
You should change your routers passkey every month so people don’t hack your router.
In my router there is long file that shows the IP address in use . I check this every weak to make sure non unauthorized IP address are using my router.
It also good idea to format you computer and do install every year has Norton and malwarebyte will never have 100% detection rate.I use Norton and malwarebyte it catch most but I’m not taking risk for that 2% it does NOT show that may be adware and spyware.
I use wireshark but it does require a bit of knowledge to interpret what it shows you. You can also download process explorer from microsoft which will show you what TCP/IP ports your programs have open (along with a lot of other info).
A lot of things check for updates in the background and will cause ethernet traffic even when nothing appears to be running. You may also have other traffic from things like windows computers talking to each other to determine who is on the local network. You could have malware or a trojan or something running in the background or there may be an infected computer on your system somewhere that is trying to find other computers to infect. There are a lot of possibilities.