In Windows forensics and incident response, investigators often need to linknetwork activity(remote IPs, ports, connection states) to theresponsible processto determine whether traffic is legitimate or associated with malware, unauthorized tools, or data exfiltration. The Windowsnetstatutility can enumerate current TCP connections and listening ports, but the key flag that enables attribution to a running program is-o. The-o parameter instructs netstat to include theOwning Process ID (PID)with each connection or listening socket.
Once the PID is known, examiners can correlate it with process listings (e.g., Task Manager,tasklist, memory forensics output) to identify the executable name, path, user context, and parent process-critical steps in reconstructing attacker behavior and persistence.
The other options do not provide PID mapping:-nshows addresses and ports in numeric form (useful for speed and to avoid DNS lookups),-adisplays all connections and listening ports but without PID attribution by itself, and-sshows protocol statistics rather than per-connection ownership. Therefore, the parameter that shows active connectionsandincludes the PID for each is[-o](Option C).