Windows Vista™ Inside Out

Testing Your Computer’s Network Security

As important as securing your computer is, how do you go about verifying its security from the perspective of a would-be attacker? There are tools available with Windows and others available for download that can help you determine your computer’s footprint on the network.

The Netstat command-line tool can be used to show statistics and configuration related to the network settings on the computer. When run with some useful options, you can see the currently active network connections and those that are listening for connections. For example, enter this in a Command Prompt window:

netstat -a | more

Note

Note the use of the pipe character (|) and the More command. The pipe character sends the output from the ...