MESSENGER POP UPS

[THEOldMan]

My wife and I both have XP. She is constantly getting popups ... a
grey box that tells her to go to MESSAGEAWAY.COM, BLOCKMESSENGER.COM,
ENDADS.COM and a couple other places. They want to sell her a program
to prevent messenger popups. I do not get these popups. I went to
MESSAGEAWAY.COM and ENDADS.COM to see what I could find out about them
and they both state that there is software stuck in with XP that
causes these popups. I THINK that is BS since I don't get them.

I seem to recall awhile back someone had posted here or another site
the remedy for getting rid of this.

Any help, suggestions or hints will be greatly appreciated by an old
man who doesn't need any more aggravation.

dd

 

[PaulM]

Messenger Service Window That Contains an Internet Advertisement Appears
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];330904

 

[purplehaz]

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.