We're uploading... something?

I need help. I'm with Rogers and we have the express service, so 60 GBs of internet usage per month. This month we ran out early and, seeing as we're three university students who spend most of our time on campus and don't really use the internet for more than e-mail and (occasional) youtube, are baffled as to why. I called Rogers and they told us that it isn't download info that's sucking up our GBs, it's uploads. Which doesn't help much, as none of us are uploading anything.

With my limited knowledge, I've reasoned it's either a virus, a torrent, (lots and lots of) skype... except that I've run virus scans, checked all of our computers for torrents, and asked the girls how much they've skyped (very little). I was also thinking that it could be someone hacking our network, but it's all upload, and if that were the problem, I would've thought it would be download information. Even if that were the problem, short of password protecting our network (which I did as soon as I set it up), I don't really know how to protect against that.

Any idea what the problem could be? More things I can check? We really can't afford whatever this is that's sucking away at our usage so any help you can give us would really really be appreciated.

 

Try downloading Wireshark at www.wireshark.org

Once installed, click the leftmost icon at the top of the window to select the available capture interfaces (network card) and click the associated start button. The program will monitor the network traffic & may provide hints to what is being sent out or downloaded. The program continues to run till you click the 'stop running live capture' icon or close the program.

This is all I know of about this program so far - I'm not an expert. Experiment with it a bit beforehand - capture short periods of time surfing the web and analyze the results. Hopefully this will get you started in your investigation and allow you to sniff out the culprit program.

PS - enabling a firewall other than the windows firewall is a good idea. Enable only 1 firewall at a time, however!

 

If your postive its not peer to peer apps or torrents running, i would try this on each computer. Assuming the computers are running windows you can open the command prompt by going to "Start" "Run" then inputting "cmd" and hitting ok. Then type "netstat" into that window, which should then give you a list of open connections, if you do this with nothing running but the basic windows, could help indicate which computer is sending the extra traffic, from then i would "again assuming windows" follow the read me first steps for the malware forum and see if its some sort of malware spamming out info. Good luck!

 

I took a look and one of them actually had FrostWire installed. And sharing. Apparently, her boyfriend installed it without telling her. Now, she only had 40 songs on there, not enough, methinks, to get 46GBs in a month, but I uninstalled it and am hoping that solves the problem. If not, I'll try what you both suggested. Thank you.

 

Well if frostwire was uploading those 40 songs then yes could very well be solved. Glad you figured it out.