Jump Menu : Content | Explore | Comments | Search | Home | Sitemap | Contact | Login | Access.

Monitoring Internet Activity for Windows and Mac

Monitoring your computer’s Internet activity is a powerful tool, enabling you to:

  • keep an eye on background processes
  • reveal viruses and other malware
  • expose unauthorized access
  • monitor running programs
  • log process activity

..and much more. The best part? It’s super-easy. Here’s how I do it on Windows XP:

  1. Open the command prompt and type “netstat -n 5 > scan.txt
  2. After a minute or two (or any amount of time), press Ctrl+C to stop monitoring
  3. Type “scan.txt” to open the log file and check the results

There are many ways to modify the log output using various parameters. Here are a couple of alternate commands you can try:

  • netstat -b 5 > scan.txt
  • netstat -nao 5 > scan.txt

The second command provides PID numbers that may be verified against running processes in the Windows Task Manager (under View > Select Column..). Feel free to terminate any processes running unwanted TCP connections. For a complete list of netstat parameters, type “netstat help” in the command prompt.

Here’s how I do it on Mac OSX:

  1. Open Terminal and type “netstat -b >> scan.txt
  2. After a minute or two (or any amount of time), press Ctrl+C to stop monitoring
  3. Type “more scan.txt” to open the log file and check the results

Happy Monitoring!

Related articles

About this article

This is article #572, posted by Jeff Starr on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 @ 07:30am. Categorized as Technology, and tagged with commands, dos, mac, notes, plus, tips, tricks, windows. Updated on June 29, 2008. Visited 10282 times. 0 Responses »

BookmarkTrackbackCommentSubscribeExplore

« Spanish Version of Contact Coldform Released • Up • Why Can’t I Login to My LinkedIn Account? »


Drop a comment



Set CSS to lite theme
Set CSS to dark theme