# How can I tell whats eating my PC's bandwidth?



## mikey1090

I am checking my bandwidth monitor logs. Its really scary.

yesterday, there was over 1GB of uploads which I have nothing to do with. So far today there are 600MB of uploads which I can't account for.

My ISP bills me $2 for every 1GB of bandwidth I use over my 8GB limit each month.

What can I do? I have no idea what is causing the anonymous uploads...

Thanks,
Mike


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## sg1

are you on wireless?


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## Twist86

Yeah if your wireless and not encrypting your connection then not only will they charge you but if the guy stealing say hacks a government website your responsible. 

I would call your ISP and let them know about it as well. They might have more reports like it and have ways to stop it.


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## mikey1090

Thanks for the replies guys.

My PC uses wireless, but the router is protected. Its a BT homehub and you need an encryption key to get in.

What now? I know its something from my PC as I can watch it on my bandwidth monitor. EG when I disconnect the internet it stops.


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## apj101

there are 2 possible issues.
1. Your wireless has been hacked. What kind of encryption are you using? WPA rather than WEP hopefully. Whilst neither are fully secure someone could crack a WEP only encyption within an hour or so by forced attack. WPA takes longer. Good way to check is by changing your current encryption key and see if that stops to uploading issue for a while, also you may want to ping all the ips in your subnet and see if you get a reponse from another machine
use http://www.softpedia.com/get/Network-Tools/IP-Tools/NetPing.shtml
(note however that this is not fool proof and the hacker machine could be set to not reply to pings, but its worth a shot... ive found people on my network by this method)
2. You have malware on your machine, see the stickies in the security section of this site


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## apj101

> What now? I know its something from my PC as I can watch it on my bandwidth monitor. EG when I disconnect the internet it stops.


ah in that case you need to take a trip the security section imo

you can use netstat comandline to see which processes are making inbound and outbound connections
you need to use the -o switch to get the PID and then look that pid up in taskman
of just use taskkill with pid # to kill that process
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/281336


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## sg1

mikey1090 said:


> Thanks for the replies guys.
> 
> My PC uses wireless, but the router is protected. Its a BT homehub and you need an encryption key to get in.
> 
> .


Are you also using BT Vision with the hub?


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## mikey1090

sg1 said:


> Are you also using BT Vision with the hub?



No, just the internet.

Thanks for the tips so far guys, I'll get looking


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## sg1

mikey1090 said:


> Its a BT homehub and you need an encryption key to get in.


I don't want to discuss hacking ....but I know of several people who have succesfully bypassed the BT Homehubs security


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## apj101

sg1 said:


> I don't want to discuss hacking ....but I know of several people who have succesfully bypassed the BT Homehubs security



like i said any wireless encyrption key can be cracked easily. it's not an issue with BT


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