Unexplained Data Use

[archie00]

Hi i am wondering if any of you guys have came across this before as I am at a loss to explain it. On Thursday morning I went onto the laptop using my android mobile as a hotspot for a matter of 15mins to check email and do a upload of a small file to a online application. Later on at lunchtime at a friend's house I went on to the laptop again and used the mobile hotspot for a matter of minutes, I then received a text from vodafone telling me I was nearly over my data limit then another text to say I was over the limit and received two charges of £6.50. When I checked my itemised data usage on the vodafone website it informed me I had used nearly 3gig of data in total on three occasions, the morning and afternoon. I am confused why this has happened as I only used the hotspot about 20 mins in total. I phoned vodafone regarding this and they could not explained it and gave me a free 2gig. My concern is where did the 3 gig of data disappear to as I did not use this much, less than 200 mb would of been my usage in total I reckon. Does anybody have any ideas? i was thinking my hotspot was hacked but then thought that was unlikely as i was in two different locations that day when I accrued the high data usage, my only other explanation is malware/virus???

[BandOfBrothers]

Sometimes the update on some laptops etc as for permissions to update and some happen silently in the background m 

[archie00]

Guys, just checking my outgoing data traffic whilst using tethering on the thursday, it amounted to 23 minutes outgoing and 59 secs incoming, is this verification of a trojan?

[BandOfBrothers]

Have you found anything by a Security sweep ?

We wouldn't personally be able to verify anything.

[archie00]

As a novice in these things, i noticed the trial period of mcafree ended Wednesday i tethered on Thursday, i wonder if i have allowed somerthing into the laptop though i thought the mcafee app on the mobile would ensure security, maybe not! The outgoing data traffic was over 20 mins(duration of internet use on 2 occasions) and incoming less than a minute which would be consistent with the two sites i logged into on the Thursday. The information on my laptop may of been compromised resulting in the high data use as it was being tranferred out...it seems logical????  I will buy a years subscription of mcafee for the laptop.. big learning curve