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I opened up the connections tab in Process Hacker and saw this...

WTF?

So my questions is this, What gives?

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2 Answers 2

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When you made activate.adobe.com point to localhost in your hosts file so that you could steal whatever Adobe products you use it made process hacker show that as your address. In other words those are just programs connecting to the localhost and because you named localhost "activate.adobe.com" it is showing that as your local address.

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    +1 Also quite amusing that when modifying a hosts file people will just blindly follow instructions without knowing what they're doing.
    – Joe Taylor
    Mar 22, 2011 at 11:22
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    @jb48394, @Joe Taylor Yeah I copied a friends huge ad-blocking hosts file (false accusation >_>), Anyway this leaves a couple of questions, how come all these programs are requesting from 127.0.0.1, and how come it does not say 127.0.0.1 (Is the reverse lookup the work of process hacker) and why doesn't it show localhost? (which appears higher up on the file).
    – user64910
    Mar 22, 2011 at 12:07
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    That's how a lot of programs work by connecting back into themselves and other thing running on the computer... I am assuming it does not show "localhost" because it is not a FQDN like "activate.adobe.com". I would suggest flushing your hosts file if your friend was letting cracks alter it there might be malicious entries. Instead you should use Ad-Block for your browser assuming you are using Chrome or Firefox.
    – Riguez
    Mar 22, 2011 at 12:15
  • @Neddy That's interesting point. Many programs use localhost to communicate with themselves, but to me this output looks a bit excessive.
    – AndrejaKo
    Mar 22, 2011 at 12:16
  • @AndrejaKo He/She sorted by "Local Address" that is why they are clustered together like that.
    – Riguez
    Mar 22, 2011 at 12:22
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It looks like you have activate.adobe.com set to 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file. You or someone else may have done this to prevent adobe software from trying to activate. This program is then doing a reverse lookup for 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1 and finding it in your hosts file.

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