What else can make your broadband use skyrocket?

[Muban]

Other than a nasty virus or someone trying to steal my wireless? Anything else obvious to check for, anything else to run?

Wireless is currently switched off anyway to eliminate that (though it's paranoia really as it was set for MAC address allow only already). I'm running avast and doing a thorough scan of everything. Running windows defender and Windows updates are fully up to date.

Literally all I have been doing the last few days is browse the web and use MSN yet I have alledgedly (as per providers usage graphs) used more in the last 2 days than I normally do in a month.

[leowyatt]

Spyware could be causing issues. We had trouble at work where we used over 50 gigs of bandwidth in a month :shocked:

EDIT: If you can get a trial try Spysweeper it is what we use at work and it's great.

[Blighter]

we used over 50 gigs of bandwidth in a month :shocked:

That's nothing :p

My server does 2.5x that in a day :p

[leowyatt]

it was alot for us!

try that Mubs, if you need any help you know where I am :)

[Muban]

Well defender came up all clear. Avast did turn up a trojan on an external HDD so thats been quaratined. Nothing else found so I will go for the spyware route next (did use spybot which didn't find anything). Though I was on my way out the door this morning so I don't know which Trojan it was yet so will need to check that when I get home.

[Streeteh]

Is this on a small home network (ie. not a business network)? If so, i recommend a fantastic little app called Netlimiter 2, it basically allows you to monitor and control every byte (or bit) of bandwidth used by an individual computer, whenever i have bandwidth issues it's my first and, to date, last port of call for diagnosing the problem. It displays every process running on the computer it's installed on and displays how much bandwidth each is using.

I recently found out MSN for example was using ALL of my upstream bandwidth to update a shared folder as my friend had formatted his PC, MSN hadn't prompted me of this at all, took all of 20 seconds to figure it out fortunately.

[Muban]

Yup, just on a home network, 1 router with my PC attached. Also going to try nbtstat and netstat to see if that points to anything.

[leowyatt]

I wouldn't be too trusting of windows defender to be honest :p

[Burble]

I wouldn't be too trusting of windows defender to be honest :p

Ditto.

What security have you got on the wireless, Mubs? Is is just MAC address control If it is, that's less than trivial to bypass.

[Muban]

The thing is I have actually switched off the wireless completely now but still I'm getting the same problem.

[Feek]

Turn off system restore
Boot into safe mode
Run full Spybot search-and-destroy

[LeperousDust]

Yeah sounds like you're currently part of a botnet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet) one way or another...

[Mark]

You're doing the right stuff so far. :)

Does your ISP count upload bandwidth? If so, does your router have any activity lights? If it does, switch the PC off and then watch them. If they flash a lot then something is trying to 'phone home' (more likely if you have a dynamic IP).

[Muban]

Well I raised a ticket with plus.net..... My PC was switched off all day when I was at work yesterday and I got home at 18:15 so PC would not be switched on until after then. They sent me a report that showed that download activity started between 16:00 - 17:00 and then got heavier from 17:00 onwards.

[Mark]

Sounds like PlusNet's VMBU has gone haywire. Not the first time I've heard of that happening. ::/:

[Muban]

Well I switched everything off yesterday all day, there was no useage. So looks like it is the PC or the router. I do have a USB modem but as these aren't supported by Vista yet I am stuffed eliminating the router that way and will have to use this router for now.

[Muban]

Turn off system restore
Boot into safe mode
Run full Spybot search-and-destroy
Did this and spybot didn't find anything. Is there any good utility I can download which I can use to monitor the network activity? It's pretty much all download bandwidth that is being used. If it was some sort of botnet thing (know nothing about these) whats my best course of action.

This side of things (as I am sure you can tell) really isn't my area.

[Streeteh]

As i say, netlimiter is a fantastic app for monitoring your computers network usage.

[Muban]

OOps I managed to miss that, will try that next.

[Burble]

You could also try Zone Alarm - it'll prompt you each time a new program tries to connect to the interweb.

[Muban]

Thanks for the info, though I have found that Zone Alarm isn't available for 64 bit Vista. At the moment I am just monitoring the useage and seeing how it goes.

[LeperousDust]

Tbh Muban it actually sounds like you've covered your ass more than sufficiently, are they sure they're monitoring you right? I mean they could screw up too i guess...

[LeperousDust]

Also try this (http://codebox.no-ip.net/controller?page=bitmeter2) since netlimiter isn't free and this is pretty good at showing you what you're using :)

[Pumpkinstew]

Could someone be pretending to be you by borrowing your IP? (That's 'spoofing' right?)

As long as you don't have a static IP you can disconnect your modem for a few minutes and when you reconnect you'll have a new IP.

[Muban]

Thanks for all the tips so far everyone. Stats for yesterday and today have normalised so can only assume the changes to the router have resolved whatever the issue was. Will keep an eyes on it for the next while to make sure everything stays as it should.