Monitoring Bandwidth usage (which apps are secretly accessing the net from my pc)

Question

Possible Duplicate:
What can I use to measure the bandwidth a specific Windows application uses?

I recently got a Dell Inspiron to replace an ageing desktop. I use my new Dell to connect to the internet. When I checked my Internet usage last evening, I noticed some 280 MB has been uploaded. This has never happened before. All i do is check my mail and chat with a few friends. I've never uploaded anything this large. What program could have done this? (And its done it this morning again. Some 80 MB)

Could you pls suggest an app that can monitor in real time what apps from my laptop are accessing the net and vice versa. I use Google Chrome to browse the net.

I have McAfee installed on this machine and fully updated. I don't run any file sharing apps either.

Thanks,

Solution 1

Try NetBalancer

You might want to read the article at http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/43713/how-to-monitor-the-bandwidth-consumption-of-individual-applications/

PS

You don't mention which operating system, so I assuming it is windows.

Solution 2

You say it's recent, so I'll be answering for Windows 7.

Windows 7 has a tool called Resource Monitor. It can be opened from the start menu search, or through the Performance tab of Windows Task Manager.

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In the Resource Monitor, Network tab, you can see the amount of data being transferred (send/received) by each process in bytes per second.

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Note this shows what is being transferred over the network, and may stay within your local network (i.e. not over the internet).

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You said you wanted real time, that's what this is. It doesn't seem to support logging. However, there's the similar built in tool Performance Monitor that does support logging. I'm not familiar enough with it to provide instructions, unfortunately.

Comments

[Norman]

Netbalancer did the trick! I blocked something named svchost.exe, and now all seems to be quiet. Only Chrome seems to be downloading and uploading stuff, and another 'something' called 'service traffic'.

[sgmoore]

I know you say you have Mcafee, but I would strongly recommend doing a full and thorough anti-virus scan when booted from a cd as I don't think that is the end of the problem. The legitimate svchost is used by windows to run services and you normally see several copies running and each copy runs several services. Some of these may need access to the internet and so blocking them can cause problems. And because this name appears rather than the underlying service, it is hard to determine what is actually triggering the upload. And so the name svchost is very commonly used with viruses.

[sgmoore]

Assuming it is not a virus, then if you highlight the offending scvhost in Netbalancer, it should show you the process information including the path and which services are associated with that copy of scvhost and the ip addresses that it is connecting to. This might identify and thus allow you to stop/uninstall the offending service.