Wilders & in/out www's to my comp ?

[CloneRanger]

Been watching my connections with PE and noticed these entries appearing, several times. This happens with cache cleared etc in FF & a fresh reload coming directly here.

I've numbered the entries top to bottom 1 - 18

223055

I couldn't copy/paste the info from the following screenies, for some unknown reason ? so i had to take screenies of ALL 18 & then mash them together.

223056

223057

223058

All the listed www's are related to apps on Wilders.

What i'd like to know is, why do i see inbound & outbound UDP connections to those www's whilst visiting here ?

TIA

[dw426]

Are you becoming paranoid? Lol, this is either the second or third post related to traffic. I'm not being a smartass, I promise, lol. I don't know, do you HAVE the apps listed in the log? Why Javacool would be connecting out a lot, I don't know, unless you perhaps have automated updates? It beats me, though to be honest I'm not good enough to diagnose firewall logs.

[Daveski17]

Paranoia? Dude, we're all regulars on a security forum! LOL ;)

[LowWaterMark]

All of those are simply links on the index page of the forum. In the description line for each vendor forum section is a clickable link to the vendors home webpage. However, the forum is not connecting you out to those websites automatically. They are only present as standard HTTP URL links which must be clicked in order to access those sites.

If you are making connections to those sites by just using the forum, then you must be running some kind of link scanner or browser add-on/utility that either preloads, caches or scans webpage links. I assume you do have such a thing on your system because of your other thread "Outbounds to Google" where you describe automatic connections being made by your computer there, as well.

Wilders Security is one of the few forums (and websites for that matter) that has no imbedded third-party webserver objects. You will never be connected to any other website just by accessing forum pages. We don't even allow members to use IMG tag links to image hosting websites as that would make connections to unknown and/or untrusted websites without the users permission. See this announcement regarding that forum configuration decision:

Announcement: Third-party hosted image linking disabled (http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=180162)

Looking specifically at your first image, UDP Port 53 are DNS lookups. So, the utility on your system is probably seeing the description links and looking them up in DNS for some reason.

[Sadeghi85]

If I am not wrong that's DNS prefetching. You can disable it by setting network.dns.disablePrefetch to true.

[LowWaterMark]

-{ Quote: "If I am not wrong that's DNS prefetching. You can disable it by setting network.dns.disablePrefetch to true." }-Ah, looks like you nailed it...

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.dns.disablePrefetch

-{ Quote: "Background

DNS prefetching was implemented in Firefox 3.5 to improve page load time. This feature allows Firefox to perform domain name resolution proactively and in parallel for hyperlinks, images, CSS, JavaScript, and other webpage content. [1] [2] Note: To disable DNS prefetching using about:config you will need to add network.dns.disablePrefetch as a new boolean preference and set the value to true." }-So, Firefox has a built-in feature that looks for links contained in whatever webpage you are viewing, and prefetches the DNS lookups in order to speed up load times. Interesting.

[Sadeghi85]

Chrome also does that: http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/dns-prefetching

@CloneRanger:

You may want to disable web page prefetching too: https://www.requestpolicy.com/help/prefetch

[CloneRanger]

-{ Quote: "Originally Posted by dw426

Are you becoming paranoid? Lol," }-

Ya think ;D

-{ Quote: "this is either the second or third post related to traffic" }-

And ? :P

Well at least i & others found out some things we didn't know before, so that's gotta be good, i would have thought ;)

-{ Quote: "Originally Posted by Daveski17

Paranoia? Dude, we're all regulars on a security forum! LOL" }-

;D

@ LowWaterMark

No linkscanner & i have this set like this, which i expected would help ?

223062

-{ Quote: "However, the forum is not connecting you out to those websites automatically. " }-

I didn't think Wilders was to blame ;)

-{ Quote: "Looking specifically at your first image, UDP Port 53 are DNS lookups. So, the utility on your system is probably seeing the description links and looking them up in DNS for some reason." }-

Not good :thumbd:

-{ Quote: "Originally Posted by Sadeghi85

If I am not wrong that's DNS prefetching. " }-

Looks like your'e right :thumb: Top man :)

-{ Quote: "You can disable it by setting network.dns.disablePrefetch to true." }-

I checked & just changed them, Thanks :thumb:

223063

network.prefetch-next was set to false though :thumb:

RequestPolicy is set like this

223064

What's best for blocking ?

TIA

*

Thanks to all the responders, i've learnt a few new things today :thumb: