Windows 10 talks too much to Akamai!

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A colleague upgraded his Window 7 to Windows 10 a few days ago. This week we installed a new firewall and as we continue to adjust it we noticed a whole lot of traffic being sent to Akamai Technologies servers. This was from an internal IP address that should not have been in use.

We think this Windows 10 PC has acquired a second IP address and is responsible for all this traffic. It is acting like it is infected by a virus. If we block traffic sent to one Akamai server using the Windows firewall on that PC it switches to another server!

My co-worker has searched online and found a bunch of similar stories that only were found because we included Akamai in the search terms but all the reports related to Windows 10. Anyone else see similar behaviour after upgrading to Windows 10? Any other articles/forum posts that will give me more info? I found none so far.

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If your colleague downloads and runs SysInternals’ TCPView it should show TCP/UDP connections between local and remote addresses, including the originating process(es).

Your colleague may wish to look into utilities like Spybot Anti-Beacon or O&O ShutUp10 to reduce the amount of outbound data.

Given the 60-70 visible privacy settings in Win 10, your colleague may also wish to have a look at this fix windows 10 article for a better idea of settings that exist and which need to be tweaked (although my own observations suggest that not all settings exist in plain sight).

Hope this helps…

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Check for the presence of Akamai NetSession Interface in Control Panel, Programs and Features:

NetSession Interface Frequently Asked Questions

Keep or Remove Akamai NetSession Interface?

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Here is some information about Akamai.

Based on what is in the article, I would say that legitimate websites proxy through Akamai in order to collect customer information. Perhaps that is one of the ways that Microsoft collects info via Windows 10.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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For large customers such as Microsoft Akamai primarily delivers content which is fairly static. That give the end user a better experience with a web site no matter where they are located in relation to where the web site is hosted. I would expect Akamai and any other content delivery network to be able to give their customer (the web site owner) non-personal information about who accesses the data and how frequently.

There could be more to it than that though.

Joe

--Joe

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