HOW TO SEE WHAT WEBSITES YOUR COMPUTER IS SECRETLY CONNECTING TO?

How to See What Web Sites Your Computer is Secretly Connecting To

Has your Internet connection become slower than it should be? There may be a chance that you have some malware, spyware, or adware that is using your Internet connection in the background without your knowledge. Here’s how to see what’s going on under the hood.
It’s worth noting that most third-party firewalls will probably give you this same type of information as well as block things that are trying to connect… unless the applications managed to add an exclusion already. Better check anyway.

How to Check What Your Computer is Connecting To

So, how do you find out what the problem is? There is an easy method using the netstat command from a command prompt window. This works with Windows 8, 7, Vista, and XP. If you’re still using XP, make sure you are running at least Service Pack 2, and just assume that somebody already hacked your computer because your operating system is now a teenager.
We will use 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.

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

netstat -abf 5 > activity.txt

Once you’ve finished recording data, you can simply open the activity.txt file in your favorite 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 “what is (name of unknown process)” in 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.