Just today I was going to click on one of my taskbar shortcuts and, through being a little too quick for my own good, missed and clicked on the shortcut to the CMD prompt. I figured, while it’s open, I’ll have a look at what is using my network, just to check nothing is there which shouldn’t be.
A strange thought process, I know but that’s how I think (apparently).
Anyway, using netstat -anb, you’re able to see what programs are accessing the network from your Windows machine and on what port.
In my case, I was a little surprised, to say the least, to see mDNSResponder.exe happily listening away on my computer. Having no idea what it was, I thought I’d run a quick Google to see what comes up. All the first hits indicate it’s related to iTunes – a product I don’t use.
Always thinking the worst, I dug a little deeper. It turns out the product is used for generic music sharing and for reasons not quite clear, is installed whenever you update or install any Adobe products, now days. Sure enough, my Acrobat Reader ran an update just last night.
So it seems Adobe didn’t just deem it fit to install additional and unrelated software on my computer, all in the name of updating Acrobat Reader but also deemed it fit to create a service, with a misleading name (Windows Bonjour!) and set it to run automatically, providing information about my music preferences to whoever may be listening (i.e. Adobe).
While Adobe claim this product is used to provide information only to other computers on a local network, the service is configured allow connections from 0.0.0.0:0 (i.e. unrestricted), when surely they could have restricted it to the local subnet, only, if that was genuinely their intent. So if you don’t have a firewall installed, any computer in the World can connect to you and find out about the music you have on your computer.
This kind of reprehensible behaviour on the behalf of companies like Adobe really does need to stop. Having a highly used, common-place “free” product, like Acrobat Reader, which has widespread adoption, isn’t carte blanche to simply do whatever the hell you want with the chumps (customers) who support you.
All this hot on the heels of Adobe being caught out installing Spyware on people’s computers, only last month. In this example, Adobe tried to hide the connections to remote machines by using a known Spyware company, with a registered domain name of 2o7.net (that’s an “o” as in “ooh” by the way, not a zero). They then used a name 192.168.112.2o7.net, in the hope that people would gloss over the connection and assume it was part of their local area network.
However management at Adobe really don’t seem to be heading in the right direction, these days, as their software continues to bloat and continues to raise eyebrows with very unusual inclusions. I suspect this trend will continue, as Adobe really seem to be going out of their way to lose friends, in the industry.
P.S.
You can find a few tools online to remove this product, however I wouldn’t use any of them, as they’re all unsigned, unknown .exe files. If you have a similar program installed and don’t want it, simply find the offending service, stop it (using the Windows Services MMC snap-in, or by clicking start > control panel > administrative tools > services) and then remove it, from the CMD prompt with “sc delete {service name}” (if the service name has a space in it, surround the name with quotation marks).