Anyone know how to get rid of this?

[eric_darling]

Seems that now that I'm using a cable modem (Comcast) at home (finally!), I'm getting new junk pop-ups that occur sporadically throughout my on-line sessions. The tech who installed while my wife was here today told her that it had something to do with XP, so apparently this is a common issue.

My question is: who do I stop these crazy things?

[Corey]

My question is: who do I stop these crazy things?

Don't hear that phrase everyday... [img]/ubbthreads/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img]



Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software

[eric_darling]

[HomerSimpson] D'oh! [/HomerSimpson]. [img]/ubbthreads/images/icons/laugh.gif[/img]

[Worm]

Eric,

If your talking about pop-ups that look like Windows Message box, then its a new way of spamming via the Windows Messenger service. You could shut down that service, but then you could possibly miss an alert from windows.

Here is a MS Knowlegebase Article pertaining to "What to do if..."

[Lorne]

Shut that service down tout-de-suite. It's a serious security hole and IME isn't necessary at all.

Some info from blackviper.com:

Messenger ~ sends messages between clients and servers. This service needs not to be running under normal "home" conditions. It is also advisable to make this service go away to avoid the possibility of "net send" messages hitting your computer from the internet. This has nothing to do with MSN Messenger, nor is it "WinPopUp".

To test for this security vulnerability, at the command prompt, (run: cmd.exe) type:

net send 127.0.0.1 hi

If you get a popup "hi" message, you should disable the Messenger service.
If you get an error stating, "The message alias could not be found on the network", you are safe.

If, for whatever reason, you need the Messenger service running but wish not to have spam popups active, you can disable the particular ports at your firewall. The Messenger service uses UDP ports 135, 137, and 138; TCP ports 135, 139, and 445.

Dependencies:

NetBIOS Interface
Plug and Play
Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
Workstation

There are some exploits that use the messenger service and it normally just sits around wasting memory serving no purpose. It's a friggin' clunky way to send messages between clients, anyway...there are other tools which are better suited to that sort of thing.

[eric_darling]

I'd love for AMS to employ an instant messenger object. That would be way too sweet. [img]/ubbthreads/images/icons/wink.gif[/img]