AOL spam
Posted by: Duncan Fullerton on 05 February 2004
I went round to a friends tonight to sort out “a problem” on his PC. Turns out that he’s getting MSFT Messenger Service popups all the time. He’s on AOL.
A quick scout round Google and I find that this is down to attacks on the Messenger service on his XP machine. Published solution? Stop the Messenger service. Drawback is that any legitimate application on his PC (antivirus etc.) will now no longer be able to raise alert popups or whatever.
Checked with AOL and this is a known problem. Their solution is to stop the messenger service too. But there’s no mention of the drawbacks!
Apparently firewalling would stop this, and as a dialup user I would think that the in-built XP job would do the business for him. Turns out that in the network connections there’s nothing showing “connected” online whose properties I can tweak, and no other connections to play with. How does AOL connect without showing up there, or am I a complete muppet?
Just as a final check, I ran a port scan on his machine and nothing shows from outside. So does this mean that a) AOL is wide open from within, and b) given their solution to the problem, and a lack of dialup connections to tweak is AOL a pile of sh*te written for monkeys by cretins?
Your views appreciated.
Duncan
A quick scout round Google and I find that this is down to attacks on the Messenger service on his XP machine. Published solution? Stop the Messenger service. Drawback is that any legitimate application on his PC (antivirus etc.) will now no longer be able to raise alert popups or whatever.
Checked with AOL and this is a known problem. Their solution is to stop the messenger service too. But there’s no mention of the drawbacks!
Apparently firewalling would stop this, and as a dialup user I would think that the in-built XP job would do the business for him. Turns out that in the network connections there’s nothing showing “connected” online whose properties I can tweak, and no other connections to play with. How does AOL connect without showing up there, or am I a complete muppet?
Just as a final check, I ran a port scan on his machine and nothing shows from outside. So does this mean that a) AOL is wide open from within, and b) given their solution to the problem, and a lack of dialup connections to tweak is AOL a pile of sh*te written for monkeys by cretins?
Your views appreciated.
Duncan