[TUT] Using Netstat to find viruses

I havent seen anything cover this before (at least not this way of using netstat) and sometimes people want to know if they are infected by a RAT or something. This mini tutorial should help you out a little bit.

PART 1 - Preparing Task Manager

Open Task Manager (ctrl+alt+del). Go to the processes column and click View > Select Columns.




Check the top one (PID (Process Identifier))



Now, organize Task Manager by PID. This will make things easier to read for the next step.



PART 2 - Using Netstat to see Established Connections

Now you want to go into Start > Run > cmd > "netstat -ano". It should look similar to the picture below:



Only look for ESTABLISHED connections (it would be established if its a RAT or malicious), read the PID and crosscheck into Task Manager. Notice in my example that the only established connections use the PID 424. Lets take a look at what that is:





As we can see, its Firefox. Now lets say you notice the PID reads something like "svchost.exe". You should open the file location by right clicking it and pressing Open File Location and either scan it with Virustotal or check to see if in its legit location (if it was in Appdata or Program Files and it is svchost.exe, then you may have a problem).

Hope this helped some of you out and good luck