Hello
As Bryce said, Steve Gibson (the guy who runs grc.com) is an expert at computer security, and I trust him 100%
I just ran the Leaktest utility from his website, and it reported that my firewall was penetrated immediately.
No other warning messages, though, so I guess I'm still OK.
Keep in mind this is testing OUTBOUND connections. If something evil is on you computer, it is just testing how easily it can get out.
A good firewall works in two directions, it has to restrict Inbound traffic to protect you, and Outbound traffic to protect other people from you.
It also needs to stop any infection that you might have from signaling its buddies on the Internet that it's OK for them to come and infect your computer also!
The fact that you got a warning about being a mail server is very bad.
You were concerned that you might be "redirecting" (receiving spam and then sending it back out again) ... from what you've told us, it would appear that you are.
There are a few, free, antispyware utilities that you can try (Malwarebytes, Superantispyware, Combofix, etc.) but that warning you got about being infected by "very sophisticated hackers" is telling me that you might have to reformat the hard drive and completely reinstall Windows and all your stuff in order to get all the infections removed.
Hope you have good backups of your important files.
As for disabling Zone Alarm, or not, it would appear that it is too late. If you're already infected, ZA didn't stop it, nor is it stopping the bad outgoing traffic.
I'm not saying that ZA is at fault. When you first install it, it asks you about everything it sees, constantly popping-up windows asking you if this program is Ok, or that program is Ok.
It's very easy to get frustrated with that, and just start automatically clicking Allow, Allow, Allow.
That's when the bad guys get you .... you may have allowed some program that you didn't know was evil.
So, if you want to try, you can download and run the utilities I mentioned above.
You should download them, then reboot into Safe Mode to run them.
Once you get everything as clean as you can, run Steve's test again and see if you get the mailserver warnings.
let us know
rogerX
--- In simplycomputers2@yahoogroups.com, renee thompson <stephssaid40@...> wrote:
>
> I ran that command because a website called grc.com and ran there leaktest
> and the reuslts were confusing to say the least . said I was a mail server
> and I was dealing with very sophisticated hackers. I dont know how this is
> possible. But if you think I should disable zonealarm I trust you. I just
> want to know how this happened so I can prevent it from happening again.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/simplycomputers2
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