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[Vieo]

I'm still a 56k user and I use AOL. I never bothered with a firewall because I heard they're really only for people with broadband connections that have their computers connected to the internet 24/7. But after getting hit with a browser-hijacker once, I decided I'd start using one.
I found a free one at www.zonelabs.com called ZoneAlarm. I installed it on Thursday morning. Since then, I've noticed a hell of a lot of strange things. My ping in games like Half-life, HALO, and Diablo II have gotten lower and I experience less lag, but that's not really the strange part. What's strange is that since Thursday morning, the firewall has blocked like 600 and something attempts to access my computer. The alerts look like this:

________
Description Packet sent from 81.210.27.70 (TCP Port 2590) to <my ip> (TCP Port 32656) was blocked
Rating Medium
Date / Time 2004/06/25 19:30:18-4:00 GMT
Type Firewall
Protocol TCP (flags:S)
Program
Source IP 81.210.27.70:2590
Destination IP <my ip>
Direction Incoming
Action Taken Blocked
Count 1
Source DNS kamionka.mikolow.net
Destination DNS **censored for my protection. =)**
________

________
Description Packet sent from 24.233.55.245 (TCP Port 2882) to <my ip> (TCP Port 32656) was blocked
Rating Medium
Date / Time 2004/06/25 19:46:44-4:00 GMT
Type Firewall
Protocol TCP (flags:S)
Program
Source IP 24.233.55.245:2882
Destination IP <my ip>
Direction Incoming
Action Taken Blocked
Count 1
Source DNS user-0ceidvl.cable.mindspring.com
Destination DNS **censored for my protection. =)**
________

About 600+ of those all from different IPs. If I never installed a firewall I wouldn't have never seen all this. Do you have this many alerts within the same span of time? These aren't hacking attempts are they? =(

 

[Bregor]

Firewalls always block a lot of 'attempts' to access your PC. Most of them are nothing more than innocent web traffic that shouldn't have access to your PC, but don't represent any real attack on your PC.