OT: recent outbreak of attempted hacks

[GreenV8S]

Over the last week or so I've noticed that the number of attempted break-ins while I'm on-line has gone up sharply. Over the last twenty minutes I've had half a dozen separate suspected attacks consisting of Ping and NetBIOS requests. Is this part of a general trend? Or is this normal and I've just been lucky in the past?

Peter Humphries (and a green V8S)

[gnomesmith]

I've been bombarded with soft porn pop ups over the same period, could there be a link?

[adam1330]

I've had the same recently. I've had several ping attacks recently, but I haven't been aware of getting them in the past. I accidently left my firewall off the other day and had a pop-up message appear, first time thats ever happened!

Adam

[apache]

me too, whats the best (free) firewall?

[julianhj]

apache said: me too, whats the best (free) firewall?

After reading a thread on here a couple of weeks back, I installed Zone Alarm - it is currently detecting over 100 'high risk' access attempts per 24 hours.
God knows how I got by for 12 months with no protection - very lucky, I guess...

Free, easy to use, highly recommended.

www.zonelabs.com

[gnomesmith]

Thanks, I've downloaded, lets see how it goes.

[rich 36]

Are we talking about the porn headings, where someone has attempted to translate into english with all the grammar/spelling out of whack, i've had loads of theses over the last week ten days

[P*Ting]

I think a lot of these reports must be false alarms. I've never had virus protection, and only recently got a firewall (I'm a poor stuudent) but I've never had anything go wrong with my machine.

There's an online virus scan at

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/housecall/start_corp.asp

Which always says I'm clear...

[lestag]

gnomesmith said: I've been bombarded with soft porn pop ups over the same period, could there be a link?

get a copy of ad-aware and run it over your machine
www.lavasoft.de/index.html

[EdT]

At home is use 'tiny personal firewall' which is free & seems to flag all sorts.

Ed

[apache]

I had to uninstall adaware, it interfered with games etc and was popping up every minute (I'm using NTL broadband)

[samn01]

I have had more than 100 in the last 3 hours ??

Seems more than ususal ?

[mrflibbles]

Please forgive my ignorance but:

What are these attacks? what is so bad about them? what are the attckers trying to do?

[jvaughan]

check out www.astalavista.box.sk for infomation on DOS attacks or other malicious stuff / security info on the internet.

[pbrettle]

Apache,

You should try the following personal firewalls:

www.tinysoftware.com
www.zonelabs.com/store/content/home.jsp

Both are good and should be free for home use.... Try them and hopefully they should be pretty good at keeping the crap out.

For reference, the Norton and McAfee products are also good but tend to be a little too alarmist! Sounds daft, but NetBIOS sweeps against a well configured Windows NT/2000/XP box wont do anything - so it needn't spring up an alert box warning of a hacker attempt. But that is obviously IMHO....

Cheers,

Paul

[Superflid]

Another free Firewall at http://soho.sygate.com , free Anti-virus at www.grisoft.com

No excuses.....

[phil1]

In response to the 'what are the attacks for?'..

I had a PC at home that was overlooked when installing my firewall protection... It was hacked pretty quickly and was left running a denial of service attack against a Canadian company!! I found out on the morning of my wedding day, when the police rang to get access to the machine. They were going to kick the door down if I hadn't answered. The Canadian police had traced it and requested that it be impounded/stopped. Some hackers had gotten a couple of hundred machines around the world unwittingly performing these attacks on the same company.

Was fairly impressed until they suggested fixing the security on my Linux machine by editing the Windows registry. Didn't quite manage to explain the difference to the 'High Tech' squad member.

Oh and the door they were going to kick down was the old house of my business partner, where the machine had been until 6 months ago! Someone would have had a surprising wakeup call.


So...I'm much more paranoid about my security settings these days!

[gnomesmith]

I was more concerned about pop ups than hacks and was delighted to find in today's IT Guardian that as an XP user by selecting control panel/administrative tools/ services scrolling to messenger and clicking stop to disable I can block Microsoft Messenger Service. Also works on NT & Windows 2000.