Bandwith per country strangeness

Do I have some kind of nasty spyware on my computer or is it just normal that when I surf on Facebook, read News from Swedish websites that I get 12kb down 4kb up from China… Australia, Japan, Somalia, Israel, Brazil, Denmark, france, Korea and so on and so on and so on…

Mostly it is just 0.5 kb to 200 kb down or upload, and I never visited a site from there!

Do you have a file sharing/torrent program running in the background? Seeding things via p2p can cause data to be sent all over the world.

Unless it’s huge amounts of data, it’s usually nothing to worry about. It could just be caused by websites using Content Delivery Networks to send you data from different locations (load balancing/routing). For example, I’m in the United States, but sometimes Facebook sends me data from Ireland. You don’t necessarily have to visit foreign sites to get foreign traffic, it’s just the global nature of the Internet.

I’d run an antivirus scan just to be sure there’s nothing malicious on your computer. That’s always a good security measure to take.

I don’t have any P2P running, and today the list is worse… Equador, Iran, Tanzania, Libya, Iraq, Madagascar, El Salvador, Sudan, Haiti, Nepal, Panama, Jamaica… is just a few on the list, everything just 1-3 KB of upload/download.

Virus scan doesn’t show anything.

4KB download = 57 different countries…

The country stats are most likely determined by IP address, so I guess it’s possible that the traffic isn’t actually coming from those countries. For example, Sweden could run out of IP addresses and then buy a block of Somalian ones that aren’t being used. There was also this in the news recently:
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2015/12/15/isis-is-using-ip-addresses-the-uk-sold-to-saudi-arabia/

Also, it’s possible for content from lots of different countries to be embedded on one web page. The content and advertisements you see on a website could be hosted all over the place to balance the load or something like that. In Facebook’s case they could be testing or measuring something, who knows…

Here’s a couple of images hosted in Nigeria and Kenya. Now by viewing this forum thread, you generate some traffic to those countries:

If you’re worried about the spyware kind of thing, you probably want a browser extension like NoScript (Firefox) or uMatrix (Chrome & Firefox). That protects you against cross-site scripting or having your browsing habits instantly shared with 3rd party advertising companies, regardless of what country they’re hosted in. :slight_smile: