Help!!! Need to find bandwidth thief!

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Alphakill4427

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Jan 5, 2014
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Ok, so last month we were 27 GB over our monthly allowance. We have a homefusion broadband setup with verizon so all that overage made an extra $270 added to our bill. I've checked every computer in the house (we have 3 laptops, a desktop, and 5 iPhones) and none of them are set to any automatic updates through windows, mac OS, or applications that I've known download stuff. I've used the resource monitor and cmd with netstat -o to see what's connected, but nothing is ever using more than a couple hundred bytes or a couple hundred kilobytes at a time. I know there are no viruses on any of the computers so there's no one or thing using our computers to do stuff. There are a couple torrents on some (old games like Pokemon on an emulator and stuff like that) and I know torrents work by connecting other computers to each other and sharing the files back and forth, the websites don't actually host any files to download. We don't have any torrent managers though so another question would be could other computers still be downloading these torrents and our computers sharing them even with out a torrent manager to pair our computers to the ones downloading the file?

I have used a program called Capsa to try to monitor which IP is using the bandwidth and see which computer that is from the IP connection list. The problem is, I need a free or very cheap software that works because Capsa will only run for 4 hours before it says I need to buy the full version (which is $1,000) to monitor for any longer. My verizon router has no monitor built in as far as I know. Does anybody know a way/ program to see what computer is using the most data so I can find what it is and stop it? If you need more details or information I can try to provide. Thanks!
-Jackson
 
Solution
USAFRet


Try this:
BitMeter OS Free, open source.

Install it on each PC and let it run.
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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If you have torrents 'downloading', you are also 'uploading' (seeding).
If you do not turn that torrent seed off...guess what? It continues to seed to the entire planet! And unless you explicitly turn the client off, it will continue to seed.
 
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Alphakill4427

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Jan 5, 2014
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Network is protected, we shut it off at night, and we can't change our plan or we'd have to go to a shared plan with our phones, which would get expensive real fast for anything over 10 GB. Our current plan was before they made everything a sharing plan so if we change it we lose it.

And I do check daily usage and we used to keep to the 30GB a month just fine, but recently we've been using upwards of 2GB a day which amounts to double our current plan.
 
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Alphakill4427

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Jan 5, 2014
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So I have torrents already downloaded and have been downloaded for some time now. Are they still seeding even though they've been downloaded?
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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If the client is still on (in the System tray), probably. You are providing a copyrighted file to the rest of the planet. Continuously.
 
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Alphakill4427

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Jan 5, 2014
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Ok so its a game I don't play very often so I'll just uninstall it. Now one of the computers has an emulated game, but he says he didn't download it with a torrent manager. Can you still grab torrents without something like utorrent? Sorry for the continued questions but this extra $270 charge was a bit of an unexpected blow :(
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Uninstalling the game has nothing to do with whatever your torrent client is doing. (although very few games are normally distributed via a torrent client, so...)

You need to get a handle on what is actually using your bandwidth.

If you've torrented a game (or other executable) and installed it, guess what...."You've got malware!" (or worse)
 
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Alphakill4427

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Jan 5, 2014
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Well that's the thing, I said in my original post I don't have a torrent client. I've really pressed into checking for malware and have found nothing. Have symantec, ASC, super anti spyware, malware bytes, and IObit malware fighter and nothing shows up. I guess I need to find a program that will monitor which IP all the data is coming from and just leave it to run for a few days. That's what I was going to do with Capsa, but the free version only runs for 4 hours.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Mar 16, 2013
171,431
17,901
184,590


Try this:
BitMeter OS Free, open source.

Install it on each PC and let it run.
 
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Solution
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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The most well known packet capture software is wireshark and it is completely free. I really didn't think anyone ran anything else since you can get tons of free software packages that will produce reports if the built in ones are not what you need.

This like most other capture software must be run on every device because the data must flow though the capturing device and in a home environment the routers generally don't provide anyway to get to the data.

If it happens again you would likely be best putting another router/firewall in the path. You could put in any new router and then put a free firewall like pfsense between the new router and verizon tends to be a little costly since you need a machine to run pfsense. Another option is to get a router that supports the gargoyle firmware. This is one of the very few third party firmware load that can set bandwidth caps on the router itself. This would prevent you from going over and it would give you a good idea who was causing the issue. This router too would be placed in front of the verizon. It would be a little cheaper since you only need a router but the list of routers that support gargoyle is not real large.

If you are very lucky and your verizon router supports third party firmware there are some other options for traffic reporting available.
 
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