Monitoring Internet Activity for Windows and Mac
by Jeff Starr on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 – Post a Comment
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:
- Open the command prompt and type “
netstat -n 5 > scan.txt” - After a minute or two (or any amount of time), press
Ctrl+Cto stop monitoring - 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.txtnetstat -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:
- Open Terminal and type “
netstat -b >> scan.txt” - After a minute or two (or any amount of time), press
Ctrl+Cto stop monitoring - Type “
more scan.txt” to open the log file and check the results
Happy Monitoring!






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