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.

X-NetStat is a application that lists all the connections that your pc has as well as the program that has the connection. So you can see a lot of instances of your web browser for example when you just visited some sites. But you can also see other connections that you didn’t start. This can be an program like your anti virus that is updating, but it can also be the windows remote software connecting to an irc channel for example. When you see that happening you can make an rule with the right mouse button that will always kill that connection when it’s made.

The only downside to this program is that you have to look at the connections yourself, but it is an help if you have the feeling your pc has been hacked. Also i have switched to Linux (Kubuntu distro) as my main OS today as i was completely fed up with Windows, so if you have questions etc. about Linux you can ask them.

I know Martin will also switch to Linux in the future, so i won’t make very detailed reports of my Linux experience but i will answer some questions and maybe try out some software if you want