messanger pop ups

  • Thread starter Thread starter mikr
  • Start date Start date
M

mikr

i have had those messanger pop ups and i turned on my
firewall with windows xp. But i read that i need to do
something else besides just being able to ignore them
becuase it can cause some serious damage. What do i need
to do
 
If they say messenger service in the title bar, these have nothing to do
with MSN messenger or Windows messenger. What this is a new way for spammers
to attack your computer and send you pop-up ads. If you receive these ads it
means that your computers netbios ports are wide open to the internet and
this could be a real security problem. What you should do is install a good
firewall that will block the ports the spammers use and stop the ads. A good
place to start is Zone Alarm ( www.zonelabs.com ) for an inbound/outbound
blocking firewall or use the inbound blocking only firewall built in to XP.
If needed configure the XP firewall to block ports 135, 137-139 and 445.
Zone Alarm will block these ports by default.

Use this site to test some of your ports security:
https://grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2

You can disable the messenger service, which is the service the spammers
exploit, but it isn't needed to stop the ads and disabling the service will
not secure your computer from outside attacks or block the open netbios
ports.

Note: If the Messenger service is stopped, messages from the Alerter
service (notifications from your antivirus software, for example) are
not transmitted. If the Messenger service is turned off, any services
that explicitly depend on the Messenger service do not start, and an
error message is logged in the System event log. For this reason,
Microsoft recommends that you install a firewall and configure it to
block NetBIOS and RPC traffic instead of turning off the Messenger
service.

If they don't say messenger service in the title bar, then download and
install a good popup blocker and install and run spybot as well.

http://security.kolla.de/
 
Hi Mikr,
The messenger pop ups themselves can't do any damage to your machine,
they're just annoying. As you have a firewall setup on your connection to
block these messages your not ignoring them, you are preventing them from
reaching your computer.

Mark
 
-----Original Message-----
i have had those messanger pop ups and i turned on my
firewall with windows xp. But i read that i need to do
something else besides just being able to ignore them
becuase it can cause some serious damage. What do i need
to do
.
Click to expand...
Go into control panel and then to administrative tools.
Computer management and then to services and applications
and then to services.
scroll down to messenger and turn the service off.
It is set to default on if you restart your computer
unless you change it to manual setting and then you will
have to turn it on yourself.
 
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