adcasterextreme - a new popup evil

and I thought xupiter was bad, this tops it

[amznVibe]

So I come back to my PC this morning, turn on the monitor and lo and behold,
there was full popup message covering the screen with a OK button.

Looks very much like an alert box with no fancy text allowed, etc

Unless my cats have learned to browse during the night, the only thing left running that was open to the internet was trillian.

I am not going to post the physical link that the ad shows for
"if you want YOUR message to reach millions of people worldwide, just like this reached you"
but its off geocities called adcasterextreme

(It is also a PR7 on geocities?)

Google shows very limited info about adcasterextreme but I am about to go get the newest spybot update from spybot.com. I do actually use spybot but it did not spot this yesterday. Ad-aware and two trojan scanners also did NOT pick this up.

[amznVibe]

After discovering that spybot (search & destroy) will NOT solve this problem
I went looking futher and found this 100% free solution (also has an example of the type of message I received)

[stopmessengerspam.com...]

The (popup) utilizes Microsoft Windows Messenger Service, which is turned on by default (on WinNT, 2000, and XP systems) and used by administrators to send messages to users on the network. This is different from the MSN Messenger instant message software.

There is just one catch to disabling this, and this kinda bothers me, it may result in Windows not being able to alert you to some conditions like print spooler status, anti-virus alerts, and event logger status messages. For now I am just going to disable this until a better solution comes alot (like maybe blocking the external port, if I only knew what it was?)

[Fiver]

chances are what that app does is block the port.

the messages can be seen yourself on an internal network by running this string from the command line

"net send computername messagetext"

or if you have friends who run nicely unprotected computers, over the Internet

"net send ipaddress hiunprotectedpeople!"

you'll get a little windows popup message - great for getting my co-workers attention when they have headphones on - but fairly horrible to get porn spam grabbing your comps focus.

I run a basic but comprehensive personal software firewall on the @home network in Ontario, and can't seem to net send myself messages by ip.. I'm not blocking the port locally (port 143 or something near that) so I kind of expect my ISP is choosing to block it for me somewhere along the lines.

Spammers just send the same message to a fat range of ip addresses, and hope they hit.