Revisiting this today, because something tried to connect to the internet from my computer to an Akamai server in the name of a batch file I have created. This batch file starts another batch file, which in turn performs an edit. The batch files have nothing whatsoever to do with the internet, and I blocked the attempt with my firewall. Strangest, the connection was a System connection, which means whatever did this was using a system process whose connection is vital.

I am not so sure about this statement quoted above. Just because they do business with Microsoft or anyone else doesn’t mean there can’t be something strange going at Akamai

Big companies and especially security companies that are net dependent need to get out from behind these data management services, so that users can easily identify what is happening at any time with their internet connection and with their private and personal information. We also need much better montoring software, so that we can monitor what is being uploaded off of our systems.

For anyone interested, the initial post in this thread is interesting:

http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=112353.0

This might be an old topic, but obviously it’s not a dead one…