Rundll32 Connecting To The Internet

racinGSRstyle

Hi,

My OS is Vista Home Premium x64 on my home computer and I am running an up to date version of BitDefender 2009 Internet Security.

I recently had what I believed to be a virus on my computer, so I formatted the hard drive and did a fresh installation of vista again. (I can't remember if I got an actual virus blocked on your pc message from bitdefender, my pc's from my work have been plagued with problems because of our Outlook email so I might be getting the two situations confused, but i think i did).

I have multiple other hard drives (internal) for storage in the same pc, which i reconnected a few days after i had the new vista install up to date with all of my preferred applications, settings, etc. These drives are in the same condition they were in before the vista reinstallation, I did not wipe them clean or anything. I did a anti-virus scan with bitdefender and a malware scan with another program though, all coming up negative.

Last night I got a message from BitDefender's firewall saying that rundll32 was allowed to connect to the internet. This seemed to occur around the same time as I opened a video file I downloaded from the internet a few months ago. The video file was on one of my storage drives.

I have used bitdefender for a few years now and I do not recall seeing this message ever before. I immediately blocked rundll32 in the firewall for the time being.

Is this a normal occurance? Or should I be worried?

csalgau

Dear user,

Rundll32.exe is a standard component of Windows and is required for a number of tasks. Many dialog boxes displayed by your operating system are not stored in stand-alone executables but are stored in DLLs. To show you these dialog boxes, the requesting application either loads the DLL directly or starts rundll32.exe in order to host the dll file and run the needed function. While Windows DLLs that are normally hosted by rundll32.exe(mostly some control panel applets) do not require network access, some third-party DLLs may need such access.

If you suspect something is wrong, please follow the steps outlined in http://kb.bitdefender.com/KB490 - you may post the files on the forums if you do not want to contact customer support.