andyjreid said:
eneville said:
Blyth Spirit said:
Just had a box appear on my screen telling me that our chums at Norton had blocked an "attack" on my PC...no action required by me.
There are some naughty people out there!
:|
Have you tried this? The "Shields Up" scanner here, <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2</a><!-- m -->, it will attempt to connect to your internet facing IP address on all the common service ports (1-1024) so you may get other popups telling you about this but it's for a good reason. Ideally the output will be a page full of green, indicating no open ports.
eneville, how would you deal with what you felt to be too many open ports?
Simply, a firewall of some sorts.
This could be achieved from simply using a NAT firewall router, since it (shouldn't) by default forward all ports to your desktop.
If you've directly connected the ISP network cable to your computer then you should have a firewall enabled, albeit a software firewall isn't ever going to be as reliable as a hardware (NAT) firewall.
Unless you're running your own network services (web/dns/email) I can't think of any reason why you'd need to have ports forwarding from the NAT device.
The difference between the green and blue boxes is based on how the firewall responds to the inbound connection attempt, green means basically that the firewall has received the pack and done absolutely nothing about it, and blue meeds the attempt has been rejected, which would tell the remote host that a device is online, in my view this is not as good.
There are some free software firewalls available to download and install. Sadly most of the Windows firewalls are a lot bulkier and interfere with your desktop experience too much these days.
I'd start with <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://download.cnet.com/Tiny-Personal-Firewall/3000-10435_4-10266527.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://download.cnet.com/Tiny-Personal- ... 66527.html</a><!-- m --> and run the Shields Up test again to ensure that it's working properly.