I was sitting at my PC tonight with the headphones on and I heard some audio suddenly come into my headphones.
The sound was just background noise, similar to the sounds you would hear if you were on the phone to someone and that person wasn’t talking. But I did hear the person making some sounds, like breathing and slight movements. I could not hear any typing though.
I immediately suspected a hacker had gotten into my PC and unbeknownst to them their microphone was sending their sounds through to my PC. That’s what it seemed like, although I have never heard of this happening to anyone before.
It lasted about 10-15 seconds then just stopped.
I do have Skype running in my system tray, but I wasn’t in a call. I was playing BF2 (an online shoot-em-up game) about an hour earlier and it has a built-in chat service but I had exited the game. I know my system fairly well and there wasn’t anything running which would have warranted such a sound.
Within a few seconds of this bizarre incident, I went to the command prompt and typed netstat -n and saved the screencap.
For those of you who don’t know, netstat -n is a DOS command which lists all the IPs and respective ports (local and destination) connected to your PC at that very moment. You can try this yourself by clicking Start>Run, then type "cmd", click OK to open the DOS window, then type "netstat -n" press Enter.
The results were varied, a few ‘established’ connections on ports other than 80 (for example, ports 17368, 39765, 30853). A trace on the IPs gave Russia twice and Italy once. I am in Australia. From experience, a netstat -n will show connections from the last minute or so. If that’s the case and it was a hacker, I definitely have their IP at least.
I have done a few searches in Google for anyone else who had experienced this but found nothing helpful.
So, my question is, what the heck just happened?
Yup, that is bizarre! I would first suggest checking your system for a virus, such as sub-seven which has the ability to listen in on your mic and hit your webcam, but it sounds like you have this covered, so it must be something running that you have allowed.
The first thing that comes to my mind would be to start monitoring the speaker
Thanks for the reply. It’s definitely not the old Win 98 hacker favourite Sub7. My AVG (AV and AS) has that covered, plus my ZA doesn’t allow any program I don’t know and my router has only one port forward set.
It’s been a couple of days now and I haven’t heard such a sound since, so I am resigned to believing it was a memory delay from the chat part of the game I play.
In BF2, if someone is speaking on the chat at the very end of the round their microphone is locked on for a few seconds. You can hear them say things that they don’t know is being transmitted. Sometimes it’s funny, other times it’s just breathing (btw, EA Games should fix that privacy issue). The breathing from the game is very similar to what I heard but it was an hour after I exited the game.
Either way, it’s still strange, but not as scary as when it happened. I went into complete lockdown for a while there.
Anyway, thanks again! ;-)
Rick