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Invisible Processes
With an increasing number of
computers constantly connected to the Internet, improving local
system security is more important that ever before. Today you
cannot leave your computer connected to the Internet for more than
a few days without being probed by hackers. Of course you can
install firewalls and anti virus software, use long passwords and
avoid downloading executables or anything else that might contain
viruses or Trojans; but this will only protect your system from
being infected or hacked from the outside. What if there is
already a Trojan or some other unwanted program running on your
computer. How do you find out? Would you notice if there was an
invisible process running in your system that was only active for
a few hours every night?
Detecting
Intruders
So, how can you find out what is going on in
your system when you are not around. One way of finding suspicious
processes is to look for unexpected CPU usage. Many of you have
probably used this method already, using the Windows Task Manager
to find out which processes are using the CPU. The Windows Task
Manager is rather limited though, and it doesn't give you CPU
usage graphs for each process. To make this method really
efficient we also need to save the CPU usage for many hours, so
that we can inspect the CPU usage graphs later looking for
deviations and unexpected CPU loads. WinTasks 5 Professional is
capable of logging CPU usage per process for up to 24 hours, which
is more than enough for detecting suspicious process. WinTasks 5
Professional can also run in the background, continuously logging
CPU and memory usage while consuming a minimum of system
resources. To decide which processes have been active during the
night, you simply launch WinTasks and open the resource statistics
window. Set the time scale to 24 hours and look for deviations in
the total CPU usage graph. If there are any longer periods of high
CPU loads, step through all running processes using the arrow keys
to find the processes that were active during that period. This
gives you a good starting point for identifying unwanted
processes, backdoors, Trojans, and viruses. After identifying the
suspicious processes, you can simply search the Internet for the
executable files to find out what each process does.
Conclusion
Logging CPU usage for
longer periods of time can be an excellent method of finding
unwanted processes and other security threats. Combined with other
softwares like anti-virus programs and firewalls this will improve
overall system security and help you to stop attacks from within
your system.
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