How to See Which Websites Is Your Computer Secretly Connecting To

Have you come to notice that your internet connection speed has been reduced when it shouldn't be? Chances are that some Malware, Spyware or Adware is using your internet connection in the background without even being detected by you.

How to check What your Computer is connecting to

There is an easy method to find out the problem by using the netstat command from a command prompt window. This works with Windows XP and above. If you’re still using XP, make sure you are running at least Service Pack 2.

We will be using the netstat command to generate a list of everything that has made an Internet connection in a specified amount of time. To use the netstat command, you must run the command prompt window as administrator.

If you are using Windows 8.x you can right-click on the Start Button and choose the Command Prompt (Admin) option.

If you are on Windows 7 or Vista, open the Start menu and enter “cmd.exe” in the Search box. When the results display, right-click on cmd.exe and select Run as administrator from the popup menu.

If the User Account Control dialog box displays, click Yes to continue. 

Note: You may or may not not see this dialog box, depending on your User Account Control settings.

At the command prompt, type the following command and press Enter.

netstat -abf 5 > activity.txt

The –a option shows all connections and listening ports, the –b option shows you what application is making the connection, and the –f option displays the full DNS name for each connection option for easier understanding of where the connections are being made to. You can also use the –n option if you wish to only display the IP address. The 5 option will poll every 5 seconds for connections to make it more easy to track what is going on, and the results are then piped into the activity.txt file.

Wait about two minutes and then press Ctrl + C to stop the recording of data.

Once you’ve finished recording data, you can simply open the activity.txt file in any text editor to see the results, or you can type activity.txt at the command line to open it in Notepad.

The resulting file will list all processes on your computer (browsers, IM clients, email programs, etc.) that have made an internet connection in the last two minutes, or however long you waited before pressing Ctrl + C. It also lists which processes connected to which websites.

If you see process names or website addresses with which you are not familiar, you can search for it on Google and see what it is. It may be a system function you don’t know about or a function of one of your running programs. However, if it seems like a bad site, you can use Google again to find out how to get rid of it.