Was wondering if there was a better tool out there for monitoring what is sending data?
While gadgets for Windows 7, you should really have them turned off due to a potential security exploit if you have a dirty gadget, I still run my Network and CPU/RAM monitoring gadgets on my Windows 7 systems because I know they are clean and like to keep a eye on resources and communication to and from my system.
I saw a trickle of an upload going on the network meter that caught my attention, and so i ran Wireshark to see what was going on. Their was more data being uploaded than downloaded which is what caught my attention but it wasnt a full out upload using all bandwidth it was just a trickle that was unusual.
Wireshark informed me that the trickle was coming from my Google Drive with traffic on port 443. I havent made any changes to my data on my Google Drive cloud storage in about a month. I assume its just testing the data between the pairing of the Cloud and the Google Drive Folder.
This got me thinking that maybe there are tools or utilities out there that might be able to flag when data is being uploaded or downloaded that is unexpected. In the past I have had free games that turn my system into a torrent seed and I have had to kill those off. Pando Media Booster was a problem of the past using up my bandwidth of my internet to seed for others to download the game and updates etc. I had to break the seed feature to stop this. This too I detected with the Network Meter gadget.
With wireshark its pretty much set to monitor and log the network. Then stop it and scroll through and write down IP addresses and then google search to figure out what is what. To me this seems like a very manual process and maybe there is a better tool or utility already out there that will log or notify and display what the IP address pairs up with without having to go through the manual process.
I have used WinPatrol in the past for programs that try to make changes etc, but there is nothing that I know of that will pop up and say "Heads Up... this program is uploading data".
Downloads I am not as concerned about, but upload traffic that is unusual I like to know if I have a data leak going on etc or am being used as a seed for a torrent etc.
For the fact that it was just Google Drive I am not that worried, but this recent oddity got me thinking and questioning if maybe there is a better way. If it wasnt for this Gadget that I shouldnt be using due to vulnerability according to Microsoft, I wouldnt have known that I had this upload trickle going on.