I got ADSL yesterday. Within an hour of being online, I was getting porn spam network messages (not pop-ups, nothing to do with browsing) directly targeted to people in my country with censored internet access.
Very luckily a hacker (legit, works for security company) friend of mine was online, and immediately recommended getting a firewall. Being a Mac user normally - though the ADSL is on a Win2000 laptop - I stupidly hadn’t given it much thought. I immediately installed something called Zone Alarm.
Within the past 24 hours I have had 689 intrusions, 181 of them “high rated”. I have clicked for info on some of them, and some are to do with Kazaa, but the vast majority just seem scary.
I reinstalled windows xp the other day and didn’t do any post-install work … virus scanner, firewall etc… and left my machine alone for a few days before i had a chance to do any work. When i sat down, to my suprise i had about 20 popup windows (not browser windows) with various ads on them. I was aware that these popups existed, but it had been so long since i reinstalled my machine i had forgotten about them. If you are receiving these… you will need to disable the “messenger” service, this will stop the ads from coming through. You can do this by right clicking my computer and selecting “manage”. Find messanger under services and set it to disabled.
Great! Found it, and have done just that. Thanks for the advice. I haven’t had any messages since installing Zone Alarm, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.
