Spyware, by its nature, tends to ‘phone home’. That is, it gathers information about you and then transmits it secretly to another location. The traditional way to combat this is to have a bunch of monitoring utilities or scanners to detect this, but a more advanced way is to simply gather the data yourself and track it down. A tool to help do this is Port Reporter.

Port Reporter logs TCP and UDP port activity on a local Windows system. Port Reporter is a small application that runs as a service on Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003.

On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 this service is able to log which ports are used, which process is using the port, if the process is a service, which modules the process has loaded and which user account is running the process.

This can be an incredibly useful tool, not only for tracking down spyware, but for system admins to keep tabs of everything running on their system which receives or transmits data. To help with diagnosis or analysis, you can use the Port Reporter Parser tool to make sense of the data.

While this tool is not going to be for everyone, it allows power users to get extremely detailed information on all network activity on your system.