XP Popups and Registration Name

[A D Dawson]

If anyone can help with the following two questions, Thanx:
1) All of a sudden I am getting all kinds of popup and popunder ads when
I get on the internet. I am using Netscape Communicator 4.8, but most
of the ads are saying "internet explorer" in the title area. What's
going on as far as this just starting out of the blue and is there a way
to minimize it?

2)I recently had to replace my hard drive and being computer illiterate
I took it to a national company to have it done. The put the
information for the registration name incorrectly and now anytime I want
to install new software it gives wrong name. Is there a way of changing
the registration name short of re-installing XP?

Thanx, dewey dawson

 

[purplehaz]

For #1:
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 the pop-ups appear while surfing web pages then download and install one
of the many pop-up blocker programs. Search www.download.com for popup
blocker, you'll find many free ones.

Also get a good spyware cleaner -- http://security.kolla.de/