Monkey Raptor

Monday, September 1, 2014

How to Display Current Network Connections on Windows (Command Prompt)

It's using command prompt
Windows doesn't provide direct shortcut to command prompt, because, well, it isn't THAT necessary if you're not interested to tinker your computer's operating system.

Opening the command prompt
First, open the RUN prompt. The hotkey will be:
WindowsKey + r or WindowsKey + R
WindowsKey is that keyboard button with the Windows logo on it.

Second, type cmd for opening the command prompt. Hit enter. The command prompt will be shown.

Using netstat command line
First of all, why do we need to look at the network statistics of our computer (machine)?
  • If we're developing something on our local machine, or even live on the internet, we can see the active ports statistics. The coming in and out traffic, and what type of program is used to start/pause/stop the connections.
  • We can also use that to detect/monitor malicious connections from "funky" software (that we intentionally/accidentally installed). Such as trojan or worm or just sadistic virus. Hm.
    Anyway, the point being, by observing the current network statistics, we'll have some ideas of what's happening while we're connected to the internet and, hopefully, we can (fully) take control of our own machine, later on, someday.
This is, like, the built-in network traffic listener on Windows for a particular machine.

Let's continue, on the command prompt, type:
to find out the parameters we can use to filter the statistics display. We can add interval and such in the command.

The basic syntax looks like this:
You can check out on your own machine what -a, -b, -n, etc means.

Usage examples:
Listening ports plus displaying the programs used to make the connections

Displaying ethernet statistics with the interval duration of 500ms

Displaying current network addresses in numerical form and the program used to run the connections

And so forth.

To stop displaying the statistics (if you're listening the ports continuously), hit

To close the command prompt, you can click the x button on the window or type

You can try it out yourself.

Trojan or other malicious things
If there is (are) any "weird" IP address(es) and unrecognized program(s) that run the connection(s), you may want to start by checking the IP address(es) location, continued by customizing your antivirus and/or your Windows Firewall to block any connection(s) from and to that address(es).
After that, search where the "funky" program is installed (on your machine), run your installed antivirus to scan the program's folder. Then, if you can, uninstall that (the malicious program). If the program doesn't exist in your control paneladd/remove programs, then brutally delete the folder (restart computer and use Windows safe mode before you do that).

My suggestion, if you stumble on this kinda problum, don't just download "worm remover" or any kind of "remover" free/paid tool. UNLESS, it's from any of legit antivirus companies, viz., Avast, AVG, Avira, BitDefender, Kaspersky, McAfee, Symantec, etc.
That's probably the last resort if you can't delete the virus (and fix your Windows registry) yourself. Um.


Thanks for visiting!
How to Display Current Network Connections on Windows (Command Prompt)
https://monkeyraptor.johanpaul.net/2014/09/how-to-display-current-network.html?m=0

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