Connecting to Taboola?
While doing some diagnostic clean-up on my PC, I noticed that it seems like a process from Acronis is holding a TCP/IP connection open with Taboola. When I type:
C:\Users\AJWE>netstat -fo Active Connections Proto Local Address Foreign Address State PID TCP 127.0.0.1:5905 taboola.com:49707 ESTABLISHED 3176 TCP 127.0.0.1:49707 taboola.com:5905 ESTABLISHED 3176
and when I use Task Manager to find process 3176, I see that it is connected with:
Managed Machine Service Mini (32 bit)
Acronis Manage Machine Service Mini
which is started with: C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Acronis\Infrastructure\mms_mini.exe
I'm wondering if someone knows why this would be the case...?
Thanks!
AJWE


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AJWE, welcome to these user forums.
I am not seeing any connections to taboola.com on my own system for the same Acronis Managed Machine Service Mini service. See attached screen shot.
From a quick check on Google, taboola.com seems to be an adware type service, so it may be worth using a tool such as Malwarebytes Antimalware to do a full scan of your system to see if it finds any PUP's related to adware?
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Thanks for the responses!
Bobbo_3C0X1, thanks for the screenshot. I had to dig around to find that setting as it seems to be in a different spot in the 2016 version, but found it by going to Help -> About and then clicking off the Customer Experience Program setting. It didn't immediately release the connection, but I'll try rebooting (as soon as my Malware Bytes finishes running).
Steve, yep, that's what I'm worried about: whether this is spyware or whether there could be a legitimate reason for this. Taboola is one of those super-annoying "click bait" advertising companies whose ads are embedded in many web pages. I use Malware Bytes fairly frequently and scanned as recently as last week, but I've just run it again and it found no problems. I also used Norton File Insight on the particular file and it shows no problems.
Though I was once (long ago) a low-level UNIX guy, my Windows low-level debugging skills aren't nearly as advanced so trying to track this sort of thing down is frustrating guesswork!
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Ugh -- I found the problem and it has nothing to do with Acronis, so my apologies for wasting your time.
(It was due to my having attempted to block any connections to taboola.com some time ago by editing my hosts file, and in doing so it is confusing the netstat tool so that connections to 127.0.0.1 are being reported as to taboola.com.)
To quote Emily Litella: "Never Mind"
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Thanks for the feedback with your findings - glad it turned out to be a simple issue with the hosts file.
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