Malware on Vista?

Xiney

I don't really know what's going on

Essentially, our web traffic is saying that we've uploaded 40 MB in the past 24 hours but we're not uploading anything and we haven't sent any large emails. My concern is that some type of malware has hijacked either my pc (vista) or my husband's (xp) and is distributing something.

There is, of course, the option that someone is using our internet connection without our knowledge, but it'd be hard to believe.



Anyway, all that is to say that I just realised that I don't know the first thing about trying to find malware/spyware/viruses on vista, so I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction?

ZENER

Remember that every time you enter an address in the url bar in IE or Firefox you are SENDING data to a dns server and then to the server you are trying to contact. Also every packet of data that arrives at your computer is confirmed by sending a reply to the server it came from. Along with this cookies are scanned and reloaded from many websites too.

40MB for a 24 hour period isn't anything I'd be worried about.

ZEN

F1reddog

Yeah I think Zener is right, 40 MB is nothing really to worry about. Try checking your internet history, to remind your self what sites were accessed from your PC recently.

This can be found in internet explorer 7 by clicking the little yellow star on the left under the search bar. Then click the History button, then choose the day or the week that you want to view. This will allow you to view any sites recently visited.

If your still worried, try downloading a personal firewall like Comodo ( http://www.personalfirewall.comodo.com/) - I think it is one of the best personal firewall programs available. This program will stop anyone trying to gain access to your system from over the internet.

F1reddog

Also, I'm just wondering do you have wireless internet in your house? Would it be possible that one of your neighbours is piggy backing off the back of your wireless internet connection, and downloading files, If you have wireless it might be worth checkin that you've enabled the secure WEP setting. ??

Fuzzy Clam

ZENER wrote: »

40MB for a 24 hour period isn't anything I'd be worried about.

ZEN

Are you joking?

With normal browsing, upload should not be more than a couple of megs. I can't answer the question but I would be concerned.

Macers

Windows Update automatically downloading updates?

ZENER

Fuzzy Clam wrote: »

Are you joking? . . .
I can't answer the question but I would be concerned.

My point was that just because you're not uploading anything doesn't mean your not uploading some data. Every request for a website or image or clip involves uploading some data. Of course if you can't answer the question then you obviously don't know that, do you ?

As I said 40MB in a 24hr period isn't anything I'd be worried about.

ZEN

gamer

it could be your antivirus/antispyware prog downloading updates,press cntrl ,alt,del, look at all processes in task manager,is there any suspicious,new process running.Could be automatic security updates from microsoft.

Fuzzy Clam

ZENER wrote: »

My point was that just because you're not uploading anything doesn't mean your not uploading some data. Every request for a website or image or clip involves uploading some data. Of course if you can't answer the question then you obviously don't know that, do you ?

As I said 40MB in a 24hr period isn't anything I'd be worried about.

ZEN

As I said, 40mb is way too much for . Thanks for the lesson in how the internet works anyway.:eek:

You might not be worried about it but I would be concerned if that happened here and would certainly want to know what it is.

I monitor traffic of a small network and have not seen uploads of that size without a known reason. Average daily upload over the last month was less than 7 MBs inc some small file uploads. It may be innocent but it may not.