Most of the programs running on my computer have access to my network and Internet and most of the time I have pretty good idea what they are. But from time to time, I still wish there is an easy for me to not just guess but see exactly which programs have gain access to my network and whether they are accessing the right place.
NirSoft has a network monitoring tool called CurrPorts that displays the list of all currently opened TCP/IP and UDP ports on your local computer. For each port in the list, information about the process that opened the port is also displayed, including the process name, full path of the process, version information of the process (product name, file description, and so on), the time that the process was created, and the user that created it. Therefore, as you can see from the screenshot below, CurrPorts provides a clear list view of what programs have access to your network at the moment. The Remote Address column can be used to verify if these programs are accessing to the right address.
It’s a free, portable tool, just like all other NirSoft tools, that you can just download, extract, and utilize it. Once it’s open, it automatically scans your computer and lists all programs that are currently running and accessing the network and Internet, and monitors them all in real-time.
In addition to that, CurrPosts allows you to close any unwanted or suspicious TCP connections, kill the process that opened the ports, and export all info to an HTML file, XML file, or a CSV file.
It’s not a real, feature rich, advanced network monitoring tool but it’s neat, could be very handy and helpful in a situation where you need to diagnose a computer that may have got hit by the malware.
CurrPorts works on most of the Windows platforms, both 32-bit and 64-bit are supported.