I just wanted to say that I appreciate your website immensely! I used some of your tips to improve the security of my pc.

The desktop contents and work I had been doing were hijacked with the info being sent to some university in texas since April 16, 2008, but that was all I could get from the source code snippets I found while searching my HDD with AgentRansack.

Later, IE6 popped up while I was browsing with Opera 9.27 (which didn’t make any sense), and repeatedly tried to get me to go to some website to get rid of a virus that had been detected. I was finally able to shut down IE6 after several attempts.

Then, I kept getting recurring popups on my desktop wanting me to click on them to open my browser and go to a website which would rid my PC of the alleged infection. The only way I could get the popups to stop was by clicking on them and changing their extensions to txt. Deleting them didn’t do anything but increase the intensity of more popups appearing on my desktop.

I had already initiated a full scan with McAffee which couldn’t even detect the malware from the inside. I ran a quick Whois network file and found that the NetBios ports I had previously shut down were still open after disabling them from the Local Area Connection Adapter’s TCP/IP protocols. This was in addition to downloading a security patch from ms that was supposed to take care of the XP vulnerabitlity. All it did was hide the information while still allowing the ports to be opened. Hmmm, that burned!

Anyway, I cleaned the HDDs and reformatted them completely and used a recovery program to check if I had gotten everything out. After reformatting and loading backup files (no operating programs), and reinstalling the software I use, I used your tips to finally get those two pesky ports closed (135 and 445). I am still working on getting my proxy to work which now blocks my abiltiy to get online now that these LAN ports have been closed.

Besides any suggestions, I was wondering if there is a way to completely hide and operate another second desktop that isn’t threaded into the previous vulnerabilities seen in ms software to prevent detection of the second desktop as an additional preventive measure?

Need to end for now, but wanted you to know that your site is really great and I hope you keep it free and running for a long time.

Thanks Again,

cg

Please always look into the email ids in the sender’s list.

So even if you do accidentally get caught in the phishing net – only one account will be compromised, not all.