so i found out that my explorer.exe is connected to bingbot through the ip 191.232.139.79 is there a way to disable bingbot from tracking me?
its not malware bingbot is a microsoft thing used to catalog stuff for the bing search engine
Lets put it this way, when windows explorer (not Internet Explorer) connects to the internet it used to be highly suspect. Under normal circumstances there should be no need for it to do this. I don’t know what OS you are using as you don’t say, I don’t know if this is the legit MS spying on win10 users using either Bing or Cortana to gather the data to upload.
When we see this it is commonly associated with malware improperly using explorer.exe to connect to the internet, that no doubt is why Eddy suggested you go through the process of finding what is using explorer.exe.
http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/191.232.139.79
Thats indeed Bingbot, funnily enough ending in Brazil for whatever reason.
The instructions are not just for removing malware.
The log files also show other things that can be helpful to solve a problem.
here are my logs
http://www.ghacks.net/2015/05/12/how-to-disable-the-diagnostics-tracking-service-in-windows/ read this
i saw that while googling how to stop bingbot but that service isnt listed for me
i restarted my pc and now theres 2 191.232.139.131 and 191.232.139.137 both are verified microsoft bingbot ip addresses
Have you tried this
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
tried it i dont think it helped as the bingbot ip adresses are still there after i restarted. im starting to think its something i cant turn off
thought id check my laptop and there are 2 there as well except on my laptop they are under svchost not explorer. Same ip address minus the last set of digits and still coming from brazil too.
Blocking it in the hosts file should work. (in theory at least)
how do i do that? also the last set of digits on the ip address change. also ontop of that 1 of them vanishes after a while and both vanish after awhile on my laptop
i found out why i couldnt find Diagnostics Tracking Service in the services, one of the windows updates renamed it to Connected User Experiences and Telemetry on the 19th november. but even so it was already disabled on my pc so that isnt the cause of the bingbot.
Adding to host will not work as it is an IP address and that does not use host
The diagnostics tracking service had a name change some time ago so you’ll need to disable the service pictured below
I love all these benign sounding service names for gathering marketing data. No wonder they have to keep changing the name as people find out what it is and block it.