Is your PC secretly connecting?

One of the biggest threats to computers around the world today is the wide proliferation of botnets. This is an abbreviated term for a network of computers that are all acting in "robot" fashion - following their programmed instructions to do damage and create chaos.

Imagine if your computer got secretly infected with spyware that ran in the background undetected. That spyware caused your computer to, on command, send out thousands of spam messages while you were at work during the day. You come home at night and everything is fine (or appears to be fine anyway). Unless you had a program designed specifically to catch this kind of activity, you would not be aware of anything being wrong - so it would continue unrestricted.

Now, imagine hundreds of thousands of computers just like that around the world - all programmed to perform a specific malicious action at the same time. This use of large groups of "zombie" computers has become the favorite tool of spammers and other scum. It's a good reason to have a quality antivirus and antispyware program running all the time. In the meantime, you can check and see if your computer is connecting and doing something online without your knowledge. Here's how:

Click Start - Run and type "cmd" (without the quotes) in the text field and hit OK.

In the new window, at the cursor prompt, type:

netstat -b 5 > activity.txt

After a couple of minutes, click Ctrl + C.

Go back to Start - Run and this time type: activity.txt and click enter. This should bring up the activity file in Notepad. Look through there and see if you see any unusual program connecting to the internet without your permission.

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