Avast generates a huge Internet traffic?

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

For a couple of days, Avast has been downloading at a rate of 50 kbps 24 hours a day from artwhere-belgium.com.

Beside costing me a lot of EUR (this is 5 GBytes in a couple of days), I wonder why avast is doing this on my French Win XP SP2?

Is it a bug or has my avast been replaced by a trojan?

I used ‘netstat -o’ to check which Windows process was downloading from this web site.

Any piece of information is welcome.

-éric

2

it’s most likely some other process downloading thru port 80 or normal browser … Avast! webshield in such case acts as proxy …

3

Please see fuller explanation here.

4

Excellent, it does make sense indeed.

Now, the other question: how can I find which process is downloading this huge amount of traffic? Does Avast keep a log somewhere?

Thanks

5

If you download and run the free program TCPView from Microsoft/SysInternals it will display the processes making network connections. Then you should be able to see the process that is connecting (via avast) to the network.

avast does not keep a log of the connections.

6

Or, you can stop the WebShield provider temporarily - and you’ll see the real process making the download.

7

Igor,

I thought about that before replying and my thought was …

If the Webshield is stopped it will cause the connection to simply terminate and may well leave no download going. The poster would probably need to restart the system with the Webshield still terminated to see the unwanted process restart its download.

8

Thanks

9

I think on XP the user just need to close/open the browser itself, not restart the computer.

10

The browser is unlikely to be the issue here … the user suspects that some (as yet unidentified) process is causing the download to occur. If this is the case it is most likely being triggered at start up - not by the user initiating the browser.