Detect outgoing internet connection

[fenrisW0lf]

Hi all,

Here is what I want to do. You have a program like zone alarm sitting on your computer. It pops up and tells you if anything is trying to connect or a program is trying to make a connection to the outside.

Now say I have a hardware based firewall so I don't need to worry about incoming connections as the hardware firewall should be doing this for me. I still need to worry about the outgoing connections.

So here is the question, is there any way in VB 2005 to make a program that would alert me when something is trying to connect to the internet? It doesn't even have to block the program or anything like that, just a message saying what is trying to connect and where it is going.

Any ideas?

[sevenhalo]

Welcome to VBF.

ffxi fan?

Your best bet is setting up a proxy computer. It doesn't require any coding from you, but you can code around it. Using sockets, you can have it notify remote apps behind the firewall that one of the computers on the LAN is attempting to make external requests.

[fenrisW0lf]

Welcome to VBF.

Thank you!

ffxi fan?

I am not sure what you mean here? Final Fantasy XI?

Your best bet is setting up a proxy computer. It doesn't require any coding from you, but you can code around it. Using sockets, you can have it notify remote apps behind the firewall that one of the computers on the LAN is attempting to make external requests.

That is an interesting idea, but I was going for something that was a little more portable. Here is an example, I would like to have a piece of software on my office computer and my home computer that tells when something is trying to access the internet. At home I have the freedom to install a proxy computer (probably NetBSD). But at work, I am a lowly peon and have no such authority.

Now you might be thinking, why not use something like sygate, outpost or zonealarm. Well at home I had outpost running for the longest time with out a problem till I got a new computer. Then every firewall software that I had tried to installed caused it to BSOD. Even before that I thought it was overkill to have all of the features that they provide when I only want to simply know what is accessing the net and quite possible block it (it would also be neat to keep statistics in a DB ).

Now at work, the firewall software causes far more problem then it is worth.

So a small little program that takes up little system resources would be a godsend to me. I suspect that there are a lot of people out there like me.

BTW, thanks for the reply.

[sevenhalo]

Yes, Final Fantasy XI (fenris is a wolf avatar from the game)

So is this supposed to watch just your own computer, all network traffic in your 'star' or everything in the company thats behind the firewall?

[fenrisW0lf]

Yes, Final Fantasy XI (fenris is a wolf avatar from the game)

I've been using fenris since '94. I try to use it when ever I can, but more and more these days it is being taken. So I decided to use fenrisW0lf, which seems to be vacant most of the time....

So is this supposed to watch just your own computer, all network traffic in your 'star' or everything in the company thats behind the firewall?

I am only interested in my own computer and specificly what is trying to leave. I have been interested in this subject since at least 2000 when I first started to use ZA and discovered that MS word tries to phone home to MS.

I think the most difficult part would be intercepting the tcp traffic and deciphering it IMHO.

[sevenhalo]

(IMO) Deciphering it wouldn't be so hard. TCP packets are well documented and the layers can be pulled apart pretty easily (context of the packet is near impossible though, unless it's a well-known port and even then...).

Trapping it is where I would struggle. There might be an API what hooks tcp requests, but if you're doing this with suspicion that microsoft is phoning home under the radar; they probably have it masked in their APIs.

It sounds like it might be their dynamic help library too? That attempts to update itself periodically if a connection is present.