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White Papers & Tutorials
Improving System
Security by Logging CPU Usage
With an increasing number of computers constantly
connected to the Internet, improving local system security is
more important than 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 you already
have 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
How can you find out what is going on in your system when you
are not around? One way to find 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. It doesn't give you CPU usage graphs for each
process. To make this method really efficient, you also need
to save the CPU usage for many hours, so that you can inspect
the CPU usage graphs and look for deviations and unexpected
CPU loads.
Logging CPU Usage
WinTasks 5 Professional is capable of logging CPU usage per
process for up to 24 hours, which is more than enough for detecting
suspicious processes. 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.
Logging CPU usage for longer periods
of time can be an excellent method of finding unwanted processes
and other security threats. Combined with other software, 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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