Currport lists Internet connections of all applications and services on the system, which can for instance be used for troubleshooting purposes, identifying if an application has a “phone-home” feature implemented, or if malicious software managed to establish an Internet connection.

The program displays the information right after startup, making it one of the easiest to use programs in this app category.

currport internet connections

The software program lists the process names on the left. Processes include programs started by the user, system processes, services, and automatically started processes. Programs are the easiest to identify, as their name usually contains part of the program name. Firefox.exe, or chrome.exe should be self-explanatory.

Currports displays lots of information about each connection, including the protocol used, the local and remote address, the process creation date, username that the process was started from and the window title.

The remote address and host name columns display information about the remote computer systems. This makes it relatively easy to spot connections that have not been initiated by the user. It is a good precautionary method to regularly fire up Currports to check the open connections of the computer system to ensure that no connections with (possible) malicious intent are open.

Currports in addition to that lists all listening ports that are open on the system. Those are usually opened by Windows services, and should only be open if they are needed on the computer. All services that open ports but are not needed should be closed to increase the protection of the PC.

The best option is usually to research the local port name in combination with the operating system, to find out which service is responsible for the open port. The service description then reveals if the service is needed on the system or not. A windows 7 PC without a homegroup or local network connections may not need the Function Discovery Resource Publication and SSDP Discovery services, as those are only used to publish information about the computer, and discover other computers in the network.

The main advantage of Currports over comparable solutions, including the netstat command line tool, is the ease of access, and the exporting capabilities. Newer versions of the program can even close one or more connections over the command line.

Currports is one of those small tools that makes the life of a system administrator, computer technician or end user so much easier. The program can be downloaded from the Nirsoft website.

It is therefor recommended to regularly check the open ports for computer security reasons. We reviewed CurrPorts (see: Who is connected to your PC right now) a while ago. It is a portable Nirsoft application that will display the open ports along with information needed to conclude if the open ports are needed or not.

My Ports is another application for that purpose. There is not really a big difference between both programs we’d figure it would be nice to have an alternative at hand. My Ports displays all open ports in a list after startup. It uses a table to display various information about each open port on the computer system including the state, local and remote IP address, local and remote port, process name that is listening or using that connection and the process path to that application. It is not as sophisticated as CurrPorts but it does its job just fine.

Most of the open connections can be easily associated with one specific program like Firefox or Skye in the screenshot above. Other ports are listening due to Windows Services or other services that are running. These usually require some investigation on the user’s part to find out if they are needed to operate the computer system. A search on the Internet usually reveals websites that contain information and advice on how to deal with those connections.

My Ports is compatible with most Microsoft operating systems including Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. It can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

You run it by opening your command prompt and typing netstat. Its highly customizable using switches like netstat -a. Its mainly used to get a quick overview on whats happening on your system connection wise.

The introduction to netstat tutorial is a good essay that features all netstat options and explains the output.