junk mail, porn-bombs, and general bullschnit

[bobsticks]

So I got back on line last night after a few days of merciless battle with my machine. I am pretty well a computer newb so this was particularly dumbfounding. In essence the story is this, I opened some junk-mail and got a doosy of a porn bomb/virus. I am not a prude and like lookin at the ladies as well as the next guy. If this was an extension of Shokhead's avatar I would have been relatively cool with the whole thing, but this was some sick stuff. It kind of reminded me of that Jaoquin Phoenix line in the movie [B]8 mm[B] --"There are some things you just can't 'unsee'". Anyway here are a few observations:

1) never download anything from "newyorkcasino.com"

2) I haven't been able to track what exactly is at this IP because it's unregistered but you don't want anything from IP 202-97-238-202 coming to you.

3)China has some bad people. I've been getting beaucoup unsolicited attemptsto access my computer from Beijing. I don't know what they they're sellin' but I ain't buyin'.

4) When I first discovered this (probably close to a full day after opening it) I immediately went into lockdown and started banning IPs. When I came out of lockdown and ran multiple virus scans and cleaners and reset my security settings, I found that everything worked as usual--[I]with the exception of AR[I]. I removed the ban on virtually everything but the obvious miscreants and things returned but for a while everything was SLOW. It reminded me of several threads in which some have complained about the speed of this place. I am still researching all the entities that have tried to access my ports, so I haven't located the proper IP for AR, but I suspect I was blocking an advertiser. You guys on DSL that have five to ten minute response times might want to go in and see if you've banned anything unecessarily. Hopefully some good can come out of this and maybe someone can get better service from AR.

5) Thanks eric for trying to help.

Anyway, that's that. Any suggestions for improved security above the basics ( and me not being a dumbass) will be appreciated. Also any thoughts on completely cleaning out the gunk could be useful. I'm half tempted to get a new computer and be done with it. I don't really want to be associated with anything from this incident and I kind of feel violated---and not in a good way.

Disturbing