
Ive been having lots of virus and trojan att. lately
Quote:
> Hi, I'll add my two cents here. I use ZoneAlarm firewall and I have it
> configured to suppress all alerts. You can work yourself into a frenzy
> worrying about of the attempts to get into your computer ... or you can
> simply supress them and not worry about them.
> I would see 20 or so attempts within an hour and get upset. Now I simply
> ignore them and let my program do its job.
> All the best, Dave
Dave is EXACTLY on the mark. (apart from calling zonealarm a firewall.
its a personal firewall. big difference)
This is the reason I dislike the idea of 'personal firewalls' in
mainstream use (pstn at least. broadband needs it). People see these
scarey sounding alerts, panic, then waste both their time, and other
peoples, establishing that its nothing but a port scan, which is
completely harmless!
Inbound connection attempts are *nothing* to worry about. Ignore them
completely, dont even bother logging them. It doesnt mean you have a
virus, or are running a trojan service. It means some one is 'probing'
your computer, to see if you've got a trojan acting as a server,
waiting for them to log in and take control of various aspects of your
machine.
But as a)you dont have the trojan installed (AV will pick up all comon
trojans like sub7 etc), and b)the packets have been filtered (ie: the
log-in attempt blocked at the earliest stage), there is no problem,
nothing to worry about.
I hope that explained it slightly. The things you need to worry about
are terminology that sounds like 'connection established', as opposed
to 'connection attempt'. It you get the first, or some wording
variation, it means a handshake has occured, authentication is either
in process or has been established.
As I use a static IP at home, I run tiny personal firewall. It doesnt
log much, and I never ever check alerts. The only interaction I have
with it is if a local application tries communicating out, or an
external address tries communicating in, to a known service.
Everything else is blocked by my first default rule (block all in, all
out). This way, I dont need to do a dam thing, it just runs quietly in
the background. And thats as good as its gonna get (without a
router/firewall inbetween my box and the connection).
Jon