How to know which ports are used by applications in Windows

Windows Defender

The ports of a computer are of two types: physical and virtual. The physical ports are those connections that the equipment has and to which both peripherals and storage units can be connected. Virtual ports are used both by operating systems and by applications.

The virtual ports are associated with numbers. These numbers are the channels through which applications communicate with the internet, whether to transfer files, download files, share files ... Natively, both Windows and our router have a series of ports open that they do not carry danger in our day to day.

And I say that they do not carry danger, because as I have commented, depending on the port number, you can access both our equipment and other functions of the same that can lead to transferring malicious information or stealing information from us.

Opening ports of both our router and our Windows computer is a process that we can do manually or the application itself can be ordered. None of the applications we regularly use will require us to open one port or another. If it does, we must delete it immediately.

Windows ports

When our internet connection is not working as it should, one of the problems may be related to the ports our equipment uses to connect. The same happens with mail applications. If you want to know what ports the applications you have installed are using, then I'll explain how to do it.

  • First, we must download the CurrPorts app. Once we have downloaded it along with the Spanish language pack (available at the end of that link) we open the application.
  • Once the application is open, all the applications that are running will be displayed. running in both foreground and background together with the port they are using as outgoing, the IP to which they are connecting, the data transferred ...

With this application, we can not only know which ports are used by the applications that we have installed on our computer, but we can also find applications that are using our internet connection, without our knowledge of it.

It is possible to know it, because the application offers us information on where the application is located, so if the Windows directory is not found or it is an application that we know, we can suspect that you have bad intentions.

To be completely sure, we can search the internet for what type of port you are using (FTP, PPTP, HTTP, SQL ... the types of ports are associated with a range of numbers) and what it is for. Depending on its usefulness, we can get to know what application it is. If not, the best we can do is delete it from our computer through the file manager.


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